This guide walks you through everything you need to get is0k up and running: creating your first monitor, setting up alerts, and publishing a status page. It takes about 10 minutes.
Step 1: Create an Account
Head to app.is0k.com/register and sign up with your email address. No credit card required — the free Starter plan gives you 5 monitors, email alerts, and a status page.
After signing up, you’ll land in the Dashboard overview.
Step 2: Add Your First Monitor
Click “Add Monitor” from the Monitors page. You’ll see a form with these key fields:
Name — A friendly name for this monitor. Example: Production API
URL — The full URL to check. Examples:
https://yourapp.comhttps://api.yourapp.com/healthhttps://yourapp.com/login
Check Type — How to check it. For most use cases, HTTP is what you want.
Check Interval — How often to run the check. On the free plan, this is 5 minutes. On paid plans you can go down to 30 seconds.
Expected Status Code — The HTTP status code that means “healthy”. Usually 200. For redirecting endpoints, you might use 301 or 302.
Click “Create Monitor” and your first check will run within 60 seconds. You’ll see the status update on the monitors list.
Advanced Options
Expand the “Advanced” section to configure:
- Keyword match — Check for a specific string in the response body (e.g.,
"status":"ok") - Custom headers — Useful for authenticated endpoints (
Authorization: Bearer <token>) - Timeout — How long to wait before marking as failed (default: 30s)
- Retries — How many consecutive failures before alerting (default: 2)
- Regions — Which geographic regions to check from (Pro plan+)
Step 3: Set Up an Alert Channel
Monitoring without alerts is just logging. Go to “Alert Channels” in the sidebar and click “Add Channel”.
Email Alerts (included on all plans)
- Select Email as the channel type
- Enter your email address (or a team distribution list)
- Click “Send Test” to verify the configuration
- Save the channel
You’ll receive an email whenever a monitor goes down (with full details: URL, error, response time) and another when it recovers.
Slack Alerts
- Go to your Slack workspace and create an Incoming Webhook (Apps → Incoming Webhooks)
- Copy the webhook URL
- In is0k, create a new alert channel → select Slack
- Paste the webhook URL
- Click “Send Test” — you should see a test message in your Slack channel
The Slack alert includes a color-coded status, response time, error details, and a link directly to the monitor.
Discord, Telegram, Webhooks
All follow a similar pattern — create a webhook/bot in the target platform, paste the URL or token into is0k, and test it.
Link Alerts to Monitors
After creating alert channels, link them to your monitors:
- Open a monitor
- Go to the “Alerts” tab
- Select which channels should receive alerts for this monitor
You can link multiple channels to one monitor, and one channel to many monitors.
Step 4: Publish a Status Page
Status pages let your customers see the current health of your services without contacting support.
Go to “Status Pages” → “Create Status Page”.
Slug — This is the URL path for your page: status.is0k.com/yourslug
Name — The display name shown on the page
Public — Toggle on to make it publicly accessible without a password
Add Monitors — Select which monitors appear on the status page. You can group them (e.g., “API”, “Website”, “Database”) and give each a display name.
Branding — Upload a logo, set your brand color, and add custom header/footer text.
Click “Create” and your status page is immediately live at status.is0k.com/yourslug.
What your status page shows
- Overall status banner — “All Systems Operational”, “Partial Outage”, or “Major Outage”
- Monitor list with individual status badges
- 90-day uptime history — One bar per day, color-coded by status
- Active incidents — Visible at the top during an outage
- Incident history — Past incidents with updates timeline
Step 5: Manage Your First Incident
When a monitor goes down, is0k automatically creates an alert. You can escalate this to a formal incident to communicate with customers.
Go to “Incidents” → “Create Incident”.
Fill in:
- Title — “API latency issues” or “Payment processing degraded”
- Status — Start with “Investigating”
- Impact — None / Minor / Major / Critical
- Affected monitors — Select the relevant monitors
- Status page — Link to your status page so the incident appears there
Post incident updates as you investigate. Each update appears on the status page with a timestamp:
Investigating — “We are investigating reports of increased error rates on the API.” (14:32)
Identified — “Root cause identified: database connection pool exhaustion. Mitigation in progress.” (14:47)
Monitoring — “Fix deployed. Monitoring for stability.” (15:03)
Resolved — “All systems are fully operational. Post-mortem will follow.” (15:15)
What’s Next?
You’re up and running. Here are some things to explore:
- Add more monitors — Cover all your critical endpoints
- Enable SSL monitoring — Get warned before your certificates expire
- Set up DNS monitoring — Catch DNS propagation issues early
- Try TCP monitoring — Great for database ports and custom services
- Configure maintenance windows — Suppress alerts during planned downtime (Business plan+)
- Invite team members — Share access with your team (Pro plan+)
- Get API access — Integrate is0k data with your own dashboards (Pro plan+)
Need Help?
- Documentation: docs.is0k.com — guides for every feature
- Email: hello@is0k.com — we respond within one business day
Happy monitoring! 🟢