Getting started
Quick start
Set up a check, wire it into a job, and confirm the alerting works — end to end.
1. Sign in
Open the dashboard at app.alwaysbeat.com and sign in with Google or an email address. Your account is created automatically on first sign-in.
2. Create a check
Click New check and fill in:
- Name — something you'll recognise in an alert, e.g.
nightly-db-backup. - Schedule — how often the job runs. Pick interval (e.g. every
1h) or cron (e.g.0 3 * * *) with a timezone. - Grace — how late the job may be before it counts as down, e.g.
15m. - Channels — where to send alerts, e.g.
email:you@example.com.
See Schedules & grace and Notifications for the full options.
3. Copy the ping URL
Each check has a unique ping URL shown on its page:
https://ping.alwaysbeat.com/ping/3f8a1c2e-....-....-....-............Anyone who knows this URL can ping the check, so treat it like a secret.
4. Ping it from your job
The simplest integration appends a curl to your cron command so the ping only
fires if the job succeeded:
# run the job; if it exits 0, ping the URL
0 3 * * * /usr/local/bin/backup.sh && curl -fsS --retry 3 https://ping.alwaysbeat.com/ping/YOUR-UUID-fsS keeps curl quiet but shows errors; --retry 3 rides out a brief
network blip. There's no need to send a request body. See
Signaling jobs for reporting start, failure, and exit codes.
5. Verify it works
Run the ping once by hand and watch the check flip to up on its dashboard page:
curl -fsS https://ping.alwaysbeat.com/ping/YOUR-UUIDTo confirm alerting, create a throwaway check with a short schedule (say interval 1m,
grace 1m), ping it once, then stop. Within a couple of minutes it flips to
down and you receive an alert. Ping it again and it recovers.