Up and running with CheckBeacon in minutes

Create your workspace and account

Sign up for a CheckBeacon account to create your organization (workspace). Invite teammates later — for now you just need an account to log in and start adding checks. Every account gets a free tier with enough room to try things out: 5 monitors, a 5-minute check interval, 1 region, and 7-day result retention.

Once you're signed in, you'll land on the dashboard, where every check you create shows its current status, latency, and recent history.

Add your first API check

An API (HTTP) check polls an endpoint on a schedule and verifies it responds the way you expect. When creating a check, you'll configure:

• Name — a label for the check, e.g. "Production API health".
• URL — the endpoint to call, e.g. https://api.example.com/health.
• Method — GET, POST, PUT, PATCH, or DELETE, plus optional headers, request body, and content type.
• Expected status codes — e.g. [200]; CheckBeacon flags the check when the response doesn't match.
• Check interval — how often to run it, from every minute up to every 60 minutes.

You can create checks from the dashboard UI, or directly via the API:

# Create an API check that polls every 5 minutes
curl -X POST https://api.checkbeacon.com/api/v1/checks \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer <token>" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "name": "Production API health",
    "url": "https://api.example.com/health",
    "method": "GET",
    "expected_status_codes": [200],
    "check_interval_minutes": 5
  }'

Add a UI (browser) check

For checks that need to verify what a real user sees, add a UI check. CheckBeacon drives a real browser (powered by Playwright) through a multi-step journey, so you're testing the actual rendered UI — not just an API response underneath it.

A typical UI check might:

• Load your app's login page.
• Fill in credentials and submit the form.
• Click through to a key page (e.g. the dashboard).
• Assert that expected content is visible on the page.

The same multi-step approach works for API checks too — chain requests and pass data between steps using templates like {{step.1.body.token}}. For example, log in to capture an auth token in step 1, then use it to call a protected endpoint in step 2.

Set assertions and smart alerting

Beyond status codes, add body assertions to validate the actual response — assert that a JSON field exists, equals a value, contains a substring, or is greater/less than a number. You can also set a response-time threshold so a slow response is flagged even if the status code looks fine.

To avoid alert fatigue from a single blip, configure alert after N consecutive failures (alert_after_consecutive_failures). CheckBeacon only notifies your team once a check has failed that many times in a row — so a one-off network hiccup won't page anyone, but a real outage will. Each check reports one of four statuses: healthy, warning, unhealthy, or error.

Choose regions and check interval

Run the same check from multiple regions to catch issues that only affect certain parts of the world — a CDN edge node down in one region, or latency creeping up for users on another continent. Combine multi-region with a tight check interval (as low as every minute on paid plans) for fast detection without manual polling.

Watch results, latency, and status charts

Every check run is recorded in its results history, with status, response time, and timestamp. From the dashboard, view response-time and status charts with time-range filtering and auto-bucketed aggregation, so you can spot trends — like latency creeping up before an outage — at a glance. Filter the paginated result history by status to quickly find every failure in a given window.

Invite your team

Add teammates to your organization and assign roles. Admins can create, edit, and delete checks and groups, manage alerting, and invite other users. Read-only users can view dashboards, results, and charts without being able to change configuration — a good fit for stakeholders who just need visibility.

Use groups to organize related checks — for example, group all checks for a single service or product area so your team can scan status at a glance.

Automate with the API

Everything available in the dashboard — checks, results, groups, stats — is also available over a REST API with Bearer token authentication. Use it to provision checks as part of your infrastructure-as-code pipeline, pull results into your own dashboards, or trigger an on-demand run after a deploy.

Head to the Developers page for full endpoint reference, authentication details, and code samples in curl, JavaScript, and Python.