Your users should never be the first to know your site is down. Uptime monitoring fixes that — it checks your URLs on a schedule and alerts you the moment something breaks. This guide walks you through setting up CronAlert from scratch. You will have a working monitor with alerts in under five minutes.

What you will need

  • A website or API endpoint you want to monitor
  • A CronAlert account (free to create)
  • An alert channel — email works out of the box, or you can add Slack, Discord, or a webhook

Step 1: Create your account

Go to cronalert.com/app/register and sign up with Google, GitHub, or email. No credit card required. The free plan gives you 25 monitors with 3-minute check intervals — enough to cover most small projects.

Step 2: Add your first monitor

From the dashboard, click New Monitor. You need two things:

  1. Name — something descriptive like "Production API" or "Marketing Site"
  2. URL — the full URL to check, including the protocol (e.g., https://example.com)

That is it for a basic monitor. Click Save and CronAlert starts checking immediately. Your first result appears within a few minutes.

Optional settings

The monitor form has a few more options you can configure now or come back to later:

  • HTTP method — defaults to GET. Use HEAD for lighter checks, or POST if your endpoint requires it.
  • Expected status code — defaults to any 2xx. Set a specific code (like 200 or 301) if you need an exact match.
  • Request timeout — defaults to 30 seconds. Lower it if you want to catch slow responses.
  • Custom headers — add Authorization headers, custom User-Agent strings, or any headers your endpoint needs.
  • Request body — for POST/PUT monitors that need a payload.

Step 3: Set up alert channels

A monitor without alerts is just a log. Go to Settings → Alert Channels to configure where you want to receive notifications.

Email (default)

Email alerts are enabled by default for your account email. You will receive an email when a monitor goes down and another when it recovers. No setup needed.

Slack

Add a Slack incoming webhook URL to get rich notifications with monitor name, status, URL, error details, and response time. See the full Slack setup guide for details.

Discord

Similar to Slack — paste a Discord webhook URL and you get color-coded embeds (red for down, green for recovery). See the Discord setup guide.

Webhook

For custom integrations, add a webhook URL. CronAlert sends a JSON payload with the full check result to your endpoint. Use this to trigger PagerDuty, post to Microsoft Teams, update a Notion database, or feed into any automation tool.

Step 4: Verify your setup

Go back to your monitors list and click into your new monitor. You should see:

  • Status — "Up" with a green indicator (assuming your site is healthy)
  • Response time — how long the check took in milliseconds
  • Check history — a timeline of recent checks
  • SSL info — if you are monitoring an HTTPS URL, CronAlert automatically detects SSL certificate details and warns you before expiration

If you see a "Down" status, check that your URL is correct and accessible from outside your network. CronAlert checks from Cloudflare's edge network, so firewall rules or IP allowlists may need updating.

What happens when your site goes down

When CronAlert detects a failure, here is what happens:

  1. Incident created — an incident record is logged with the failure reason (HTTP error, timeout, DNS failure, etc.)
  2. Alerts sent — all configured alert channels fire simultaneously. You get the monitor name, URL, error details, and response time.
  3. Status page updated — if you have a status page, it reflects the outage automatically.
  4. Monitoring continues — CronAlert keeps checking at the regular interval so it can detect recovery.
  5. Recovery alert — when the site comes back, you get a recovery notification and the incident is auto-resolved.

Next steps

You now have a working uptime monitor. Here are some ways to expand your setup:

  • Add more monitors — cover your API, admin panel, CDN, database health endpoint, and any third-party services you depend on.
  • Set up a status page — give your users a public page showing current and historical uptime. See the status page guide.
  • Enable keyword monitoring — a 200 OK does not always mean everything is fine. Keyword checks verify the response body contains (or does not contain) specific text.
  • Try content monitoring — detect content changes, staleness, and regex mismatches for pages that should update regularly or stay consistent.
  • Monitor cron jobs — if you run scheduled tasks, heartbeat monitoring catches silent failures by alerting when a ping does not arrive on time.
  • Go multi-region — on Team or Business plans, multi-region checks run from 5 locations simultaneously to catch CDN issues and regional outages.
  • Automate with the API — create monitors programmatically, pull uptime stats into dashboards, and integrate with CI/CD. See the API guide.
  • Use MCP — manage monitors from Claude Code, Cursor, or Windsurf using natural language.

Frequently asked questions

How often does CronAlert check my website?

Free plans check every 3 minutes. Pro, Team, and Business plans check every 1 minute. Check intervals are set automatically based on your plan — there is no manual configuration needed.

What counts as downtime?

CronAlert marks a site as down when the HTTP response code is not in the 2xx range (or does not match your expected status code), the request times out, or a DNS/connection error occurs. You can also configure keyword checks and content monitoring to define custom failure conditions.

How many monitors can I create for free?

The free plan includes up to 25 monitors with 3-minute check intervals, email/Slack/Discord/webhook alerts, 1 status page, and 7 days of log retention. Paid plans start at $5/month for 100 monitors with 1-minute intervals.

Does CronAlert check from multiple locations?

All plans include single-region monitoring from Cloudflare's edge network. Multi-region monitoring (5 simultaneous regions) is available on Team and Business plans to catch CDN issues and regional outages.

Can I monitor APIs, not just websites?

Yes. CronAlert monitors any URL that responds to HTTP requests. Set the HTTP method to GET, POST, PUT, or DELETE, add custom headers (like an Authorization token), include a request body, and set the expected status code. It works for REST APIs, GraphQL endpoints, health check routes, and webhooks.

Will I get false alerts?

CronAlert uses smart thresholds to prevent false positives. Monitors with 1-minute intervals require 2 consecutive failures before alerting. Monitors with 3-minute intervals alert after 1 failure. Multi-region monitors let you configure how many regions must fail before an alert fires.

Start monitoring

Your site could go down in the next five minutes. You would rather know about it before your users do. Create a free account and set up your first monitor now.