Quick Start

Create an account, add a website monitor, connect Slack, and see what happens when the site goes down.

Create your account

1. 1
   Sign up

   Go to zharp.io/register. Click Google or GitHub, or fill in Full name and Email address, click Continue, choose a password, accept the terms and click Create Account.

2. 2
   Confirm your email

   With an email sign-up, Zharp sends a verification link. Open it to activate the account. If it does not arrive, check your spam folder.

3. 3
   Land on the setup screen

   New accounts open on a screen that asks What would you like to monitor?. You can describe what you want and let Zharp AI set it up, click More to open the full create form, or close the screen to go to the dashboard. This guide uses the form.

Create your first monitor

From the dashboard, click New at the top of the Monitors page (or Create your first monitor when the list is empty). The form opens at /dashboard/new.

1. 1
   Choose what to monitor

   Under What should we monitor?, Monitor type is set to Website monitor. Keep it, and enter your site in URL to monitor. If you leave off the scheme, Zharp adds https:// for you.

   Open the type picker to choose anything else — an API, a port, a certificate, a cron job and so on. See Monitor Types.

2. 2
   Choose who is alerted

   Under How should we escalate incidents?, the default is Notify the on-duty member, with E-mail ticked. Leave it for now; you will add Slack below.

3. 3
   Check the advanced settings (optional)

   Click Advanced settings to change the defaults. The ones most people touch:

   Setting	Default	Choices
   Check frequency	3 minutes	30 seconds, 1, 2, 3, 5, 10 or 30 minutes
   Regions	All four	Europe, North America, Asia, Australia
   Pronounceable monitor name	The URL	Any name

   Keep at least one region selected — a monitor needs one to run.

4. 4
   Create it

   Click Create monitor. You are taken back to the monitor list. The first check is due at once, so the monitor moves from pending to up or down within a few moments.

Connect Slack

Email works without any setup. To get alerts in a Slack channel as well, connect Slack once, then turn it on for the monitor.

1. 1
   Add the connection

   In the sidebar, open Integrations & API and choose Slack. Click Add Connection. Slack asks which workspace and channel Zharp may post to; approve it and you are sent back to Zharp.

2. 2
   Turn it on for the monitor

   Open the monitor, click Edit, and under How should we notify the on-duty member? tick Slack alert. Pick the connection under Send Slack alerts through, then click Save changes.

What happens when it goes down

The monitor is marked down

Each region runs the check and reports its own result. The monitor goes down when more than half of its regions report a failure. With all four regions selected, that means three or four of them. If only one or two regions fail, the monitor stays up and its page shows which regions are failing — nobody is alerted for that.

An incident opens

Zharp opens an incident for the monitor, with the failing regions and what each one saw. It appears under Incidents in the sidebar as Ongoing. If the same failure comes back within 30 minutes of being resolved, Zharp reopens that incident instead of creating a new one.

People are alerted

• The workspace owner and everyone subscribed to the monitor get an email. You are subscribed to every monitor you create.
• With Notify the on-duty member, whoever is on shift in your primary on-call schedule is alerted by the methods you ticked. With no on-call schedule, or nobody on shift, the “is DOWN” alert is all that goes out.
• With an escalation policy, Zharp works through the policy's steps instead.

Open the incident and click Acknowledge to let the team know you are on it, or Resolve to close it.

It recovers

When the monitor passes its checks again, the incident is resolved automatically and its timeline shows Resolved automatically. The owner and subscribers get a second email saying the monitor is up.

Next steps