How to Set Up Uptime Monitoring in 5 Minutes

You don't need a complex observability stack to know when your service is down. In this walkthrough, we'll set up uptime monitoring, alerts, and a public status page using SentraWatch — all in about 5 minutes.

What You'll Have at the End

• HTTP health checks pinging your endpoints every 1–5 minutes
• Email alerts when something goes down (and when it recovers)
• A public status page your users can check
• Automatic incident creation — no manual updates needed

Step 1: Create Your Account

Head to sentrawatch.com/sign-up and create a free account. You can sign up with Google or email — takes about 10 seconds. No credit card required.

Step 2: Create an App

An "App" in SentraWatch represents a service or product you want to monitor. It groups your health checks and has its own status page.

From the dashboard, click Create App and give it a name — for example, "My SaaS API" or "Marketing Website."

Step 3: Add Health Checks

Health checks are HTTP requests SentraWatch sends to your endpoints on a schedule. If the response doesn't match what's expected (wrong status code, timeout, connection error), the check is marked as down.

For each check, you'll configure:

• URL — the endpoint to monitor (e.g., https://api.yourapp.com/health)
• Method — GET, HEAD, or POST
• Check interval — how often to ping (1 min on paid plans, 5 min on free)
• Expected status code — usually 200
• Timeout — how long to wait before marking it down (default 30 seconds)
• Impact level — critical, major, or minor (shown on the status page)
• Alert email — who gets notified on failure and recovery

Start with your most important endpoint. You can always add more later.

Step 4: Enable the Status Page

Go to your app's settings and toggle on Status Page. Your public status page is immediately available at:

sentrawatch.com/status/your-org/your-app

It shows:

• Current status of each health check
• 90-day uptime calendar
• Active incidents with timeline updates
• Overall uptime percentage

On paid plans, you can point a custom domain like status.yourapp.com to your status page with a CNAME record. SentraWatch handles TLS automatically.

Step 5: Set Up Webhook Notifications (Optional)

Want alerts in Slack or Discord? Add a webhook URL in your app settings. SentraWatch sends a JSON payload on every incident creation and resolution, formatted to work with both Slack and Discord webhooks out of the box.

What Happens When Something Goes Down

Here's the automated flow once you're set up:

1. SentraWatch pings your endpoint and gets an error (timeout, 500, connection refused)
2. The health check status flips to down
3. An incident is automatically created
4. Alert emails (and SMS on paid plans) go out immediately
5. Your public status page shows the active incident
6. When the next check succeeds, the incident auto-resolves
7. Recovery alerts go out, status page updates

No manual intervention needed. Your users see what's happening in real time, and your team gets alerted the moment something breaks.

Next Steps

• Add checks for all your critical endpoints
• Set up webhook notifications for Slack/Discord
• Consider upgrading to Starter ($7/mo) for 1-minute checks, SMS alerts, and a custom domain for your status page
• Invite your team on the Pro plan ($19/mo) for role-based access and audit logs

Create your free SentraWatch account and start monitoring in minutes.