1. Open the service directory
From the dashboard, click + Add Monitor in the top-right of the Monitors page. You'll land in the service directory: 8,000+ vendor status pages we already know how to read, grouped by category. Use the search box to jump straight to a provider, or pick Popular or a category in the filter on the left.
Don't see the vendor you need? Click Can't find a service? Request it in the top-right and we'll usually have it live within a few days, faster if the vendor publishes a standard machine-readable feed, slower if their page is bespoke.
2. Configure components
Click + Add on any provider and you'll land in the configure screen, open on the Component Filters tab. This is where you decide how fine-grained you want the monitor to be.
There are two modes:
- Monitor all components (the default): you'll get alerts any time any part of the provider degrades. Best for small vendors with a handful of components (Stripe, OpenAI, Anthropic) where everything is relevant.
- Filter to specific components: narrow to the regions or
products you depend on. Best for cloud giants like AWS (you
probably don't care about
ap-southeast-3if your stack is all inus-east-1).
With Filter to specific components picked, search or tick exact components (big providers also get a row of region chips). The General tab sets the monitor's display name. Which alerts you get, and where they go, is set by your notification groups (see the notifications guide); a new monitor is covered by the Default group straight away. You can change all of this later from the monitor's Configure button.
3. Meet the monitors list
Hit Create monitor and you land on the new monitor's page. Monitors in the sidebar lists everything you watch with its current state. We poll each vendor's status page every 5 or 10 minutes, depending on the vendor.
A quick tour of what you're seeing:
- Filter chips at the top: All, Has issues, Up, Unknown (when we could not read a vendor's page), In Maintenance and Paused. Unknown and In Maintenance only appear when a monitor is in that state. The drop-down next to them filters by a single status level. Monitors with problems are always listed first.
- Name column shows the provider plus a small badge when there are open incidents (e.g. 2 active), and a grey long-running badge for known issues open more than 14 days. The line below is the latest incident, or the affected components when the vendor marked components without filing an incident.
- Monitoring column tells you whether you're watching all components or a subset.
- Last checked shows when we last read the vendor's page successfully.
- Status pill is the same status the provider's public page shows, scoped to what you watch: Up, Notice, Minor, Partial outage, Major outage or Unknown. See the status reference for what each one means. If scheduled maintenance is running right now, a separate In Maintenance chip appears alongside: maintenance doesn't make a healthy provider count as "down".
- The ⋯ menu on each row: Configure, jump to Components or Notifications, pause (or resume) alerts, or delete the monitor.
What's next
- Notifications: pick where alerts go (email on every plan; Slack, Discord and webhooks on Pro and Team) and which events trigger them.
- Incidents: read the feed, filter by state and impact, and drill into monitor history.
- Maintenance: how scheduled windows are handled, and why your "Up" provider sometimes has an extra chip.
Didn't find what you needed? Let us know and we'll add it to the guides.