Introduction

What Mon does

Mon checks the things your business runs on - websites, certificates, domains, DNS records, servers - over and over, from several places around the world. When one stops working, or is about to, Mon alerts the people who need to know, and keeps a record of what happened.

How it fits together

• Monitors are the things you watch: a website, a certificate, a domain, a port. Each one is a single thing, checked in its own way.
• Checks are each look Mon takes at a monitor - a request to your website, a reading of a certificate. They run on a schedule, from Mon's locations around the world. How checks work explains the detail.
• Events are the changes a monitor goes through: down, back up, a certificate about to expire. Every one is kept, with when and why.
• Alerts go to contacts - an email address, a phone number, a Slack channel or a webhook of your own - when an event happens. You choose who hears about what. See Alerts and contacts.
• Status pages show the people who use your services how each one is doing, on a page of your own.
• Maintenance windows pause alerts while you're working on something on purpose.

What you can monitor

Kind	Monitor	What it watches
Websites	HTTP	Whether a page answers, how fast, and with what
	Keyword	Whether a word is on a page, or isn't
	Redirect	Whether a URL still redirects where it should
	Defacement	Whether a page has been changed by an attacker - paid plans
	Synthetic	A walk through a site the way a visitor would - paid plans
Servers	Ping	Whether a machine answers on the network, and how quickly
	Port	Whether a service is listening on a TCP port
	SSL	A certificate on a web, mail or other server, and its expiry
	Trace Route	The network path to a host, timing every hop - paid plans
Domains	DNS Record	Whether DNS records still hold the values they should
	DNS Zone	A domain's whole zone, read through an integration - Enterprise plans
	WHOIS	A domain's registration, and its expiry
	Expiration	A date of your own: a licence, a contract, a card

Start in three steps

1. Sign up. The free plan watches up to 5 monitors, for as long as you like, with no card.
2. Add a monitor. Under Monitors, choose Add Monitor, pick what to watch, and give it an address. Mon starts checking straight away.
3. Choose who's alerted. Your own email address is set up as a contact when you sign up. Add more - a teammate, a Slack channel, a webhook, or a phone number on paid plans - under Contacts.

Next steps

• How checks work - where checks run from, how often, and how Mon decides something is down.
• Alerts and contacts - who hears about what, and when.
• Website (HTTP) monitors - the most common place to start.