Quickstart
Create your first monitor and get your first alert — in about five minutes.
This guide takes you from zero to a live monitor that pages you when your site goes down. No credit card or install required to start.
Create your account
Sign up at telescopealerts.com and create a team. Your team is the shared workspace where your monitors, alerts, and teammates live.
Add your first monitor
From the dashboard, click Create monitor and:
- Pick a monitor type — start with HTTP to watch a website or API. (Not sure? See Core concepts or the Monitors reference.)
- Enter the URL you want to watch.
- Choose how often to check it — the interval (e.g. every 60 seconds).
- Click Save.
Telescope starts checking immediately and shows the result within one interval.
Watching a cron job or scheduled task instead?
Use a Heartbeat monitor. Instead of Telescope calling your site, your job calls Telescope on each run — and you get alerted if it ever stops.
Connect a notification channel
A monitor is only useful if it can reach you. Open Notifications and connect at least one channel:
- Email — the fastest way to get started.
- Slack, Discord, or Microsoft Teams — alerts land in the channel your team already watches.
- SMS or voice call — for the outages that can't wait.
See Notification channels for how to connect each and route alerts to the right people.
You're covered
That's it. Telescope now checks your monitor on its schedule and alerts you when it goes down — and again when it recovers.
By default an alert fires after 3 consecutive failed checks, so a single blip won't wake you. You can tune that per monitor.
Next steps
Core concepts
Understand monitors, checks, statuses, and alerts before you go further.
Choose a monitor type
HTTP, keyword, ping, SSL, DNS, heartbeat, and more — pick the right check for the job.
Fine-tune alerts
Set thresholds, route notifications, and keep the noise down.
Behind a firewall?
Whitelist the checker so a WAF never makes a healthy site look down.