Creating your first monitor

A monitor is one thing OffAlerts keeps an eye on for you, such as your website. It visits the address every few minutes, the way a customer would, and alerts you when it stops working.

Create it

1. Sign in and open Monitors, then choose to create a monitor (or go straight to app.offalerts.com/monitor-create).
2. Give it a name you’ll recognise in an alert, such as “Shop checkout”.
3. Choose the type. For a website, online shop or web app, pick Website and enter the full address, including the https:// at the start. The other two types, Ping and Port, are for checking servers directly; if you’re not sure, you want Website.
4. Choose how often to check. The fastest interval available depends on your plan.
5. Under notifications, pick where alerts should go, such as your email. Without this, the monitor is still checked but nobody is told when it fails. See Adding a notification channel.
6. Save.

The first check runs within a few minutes.

Optional: check for a word on the page

Sometimes a page loads but shows an error message instead of your content. To catch that, enter a keyword: a word or phrase that should always be on the page, such as your shop’s name. If it’s missing, you’re alerted.

There’s also an expected status code setting. Leave it alone unless a developer tells you your page needs a different one.

Prefer to just ask?

Tell the chat assistant “monitor https://example.com and email me if it goes down” and it sets all of this up for you. See Setting up monitors by chat.