Getting started

Vigil checks your sites and API endpoints every minute from monitoring locations around the world, verifies real incidents before alerting, and keeps clients informed with public status pages. Setup takes about five minutes.

1. Create your account

Register with your email — the free plan includes one monitor, every alert channel and a status page, no credit card required.

2. Add your first monitor

Click New monitor, paste a URL and pick a check interval. The defaults (GET, every minute, two confirmations) suit most sites — see Monitors & checks for the details, including API monitoring with POST bodies, body keyword checks and authentication. Cron jobs and backup scripts get heartbeat monitors instead: they ping Vigil, and silence raises the alert.

3. Connect an alert channel

Under Alert channels, add email, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, ntfy, Pushover or a signed webhook, then attach it to your monitors. Use Send test to verify the wiring — see Alerts & quiet hours.

4. Publish a status page

Create a page under Status pages, pick which monitors it shows, and share the generated link — or put it on your own domain. Turn on Allow subscriptions if visitors should be able to sign up for incident updates. See Status pages.

How incidents work

• Every check runs from the monitoring locations you select.
• A location must see consecutive failures (default 2) before it counts as down — one flaky request never pages you.
• An incident opens when enough locations agree (the quorum, default 1), alerts go out, and recovery is announced automatically.
• Bot-protection challenges (e.g. Cloudflare) are recognized and shown as Challenged — never counted as downtime.