Documentation

YouMonit is free to try and free to use for small setups. You can run your first uptime checks within two minutes of clicking Register — no credit card needed.

Step by step

1. Go to the registration form and enter an email, a display name and a password. The password must be at least 8 characters with a mix of upper-case, lower-case, digit and one symbol.
2. Click the verification link we send to your inbox. (Check the spam folder if it isn't there within a minute.)
3. You're dropped into /app, your personal workspace. A starter workspace is created automatically so you can add a monitor immediately.

The Free plan in one paragraph

• Free forever — no time limit, no credit card.
• 1 monitor active at a time (great for trying it out).
• From 5-minute check intervals (paid plans go down to 60 s and below).
• 1 team seat — yourself.
• 0 SMS credits per month (e-mail, Slack, Discord and webhook channels are free).
• All the public network tools at /tools without limits and without signup.
• One YouMonit-branded public status page.

If you ever forget your password, the login page has a Forgot? link that issues a single-use reset mail.

A monitor is one watch over one target — a URL, a hostname, a TCP port, a DNS record, an SSL certificate. YouMonit checks the target on a schedule you set, from one or more locations, and fires an alert when something goes wrong.

The new-monitor wizard

1. From your workspace dashboard click Monitors → New.
2. Pick a monitor type from the catalog. The most common is Website HTTP(S): paste the URL, pick an interval (5 min on Free, down to 60 s on paid), pick the alerting channels, save.
3. The monitor starts running within a minute. Its detail page shows uptime, response time, recent results and any open incidents.

Other monitor types worth knowing

• API endpoint — JSON / REST checks with headers, body match, response-time SLA.
• SSL certificate — issuance, chain, expiry with 30 / 14 / 7 / 1 day warnings.
• Domain expiration — RDAP-based registrar expiry tracking.
• DNS alive / DNS change — resolve and (optionally) alert when a record changes from a baseline.
• TCP / UDP / Ping — protocol-agnostic reachability.
• Heartbeat — dead-man-switch: alerts when a cron job stops pinging you.
• Cloud status — watches AWS / Azure / GCP / Cloudflare status feeds for incidents affecting you.

Settings to know

• Interval — how often the monitor runs. Free plan starts at 5 minutes; paid plans go down to 60 seconds and below.
• Sensitivity — how many independent regions must agree on a failure before alerting. Higher = quieter.
• Retries — extra attempts before flipping the monitor to offline. Two is a sane default.
• Locations — pick specific regions or let the shared pool decide.

The full type catalog with field-level reference is at /features.

A monitor on its own is just data. Notification channels turn that data into a Slack message, a phone call or a webhook your own system handles.

Channel families

• Chat — Slack, Microsoft Teams, Discord, Telegram.
• Personal — Email, SMS, Voice call.
• On-call — PagerDuty, Opsgenie.
• Custom — Webhook (POST a JSON event to any URL), Zapier / Make integrations.

Adding a channel

1. Click Notifications → New, pick the channel family.
2. Paste the webhook URL / phone number / API key as the channel asks.
3. Hit Send test. A confirmation message lands in the channel within a few seconds — confirm the channel is enabled for production use.

Routing

Each monitor can have its own set of channels. Typical pattern: warning → chat, critical → on-call, every event → a webhook for the internal incidents log. Quiet hours on each channel hand the on-call duty cleanly across time zones; escalation chains ring the next person if the first ack hasn't landed within N minutes.

Acknowledge from chat

Slack / Teams messages carry inline Acknowledge and Resolve buttons — you don't need to open the dashboard to silence the alert while you investigate.

When a monitor flips to offline (after passing the retry-and-sensitivity gates), YouMonit opens an incident. The incident is the record of one continuous outage — start time, end time, every check that failed, every notification sent.

States an incident moves through

1. Open — the monitor is still failing. Alerts are routed through your configured channels.
2. Acknowledged — a teammate clicked Acknowledge. Re-alerts pause for the configured snooze window.
3. Resolved — the monitor recovered (or someone manually closed it). A resolve notification goes out and the incident is archived.

Incident detail

Every incident page lists: every failed check (with location + response time + error), the timeline of state changes, who acked when, which channels received which messages. Useful for post-incident review and for keeping evidence of SLA compliance.

Filtering out noise

• Sensitivity ≥ 2 makes the dispatcher wait for two independent regions to fail before opening an incident. Kills single-checker flakiness.
• Maintenance windows on a monitor suppress incidents during planned work.
• Per-monitor pause stops checking entirely (config preserved) when a service is intentionally offline.

A YouMonit-hosted public status page turns your monitors into a customer-facing health board. Available on every plan including free.

Create one

1. Go to Status pages → New.
2. Give it a name, a slug (used in the URL), pick which monitors appear, choose whether to show uptime bars and incident history.
3. Add a logo, brand colour and short description.
4. Save. The page is now live at youmonit.com/status/{slug}.

Custom domain

Add status.yourcompany.com as the custom domain. YouMonit registers it on the platform automatically (subdomain of the primary domain on cPanel) and AutoSSL issues a Let's Encrypt certificate within a few minutes. No DNS magic needed beyond pointing the CNAME or A record at YouMonit.

News posts & RSS

Each status page has a built-in News posts system: publish incident timelines, scheduled-maintenance notices and general announcements. Every post is included in the page's RSS feed at /status/{slug}/rss.xml — readers and incident-management tools can subscribe.

Branded or standalone

A per-page toggle controls whether the status page renders inside the full YouMonit chrome (handy for the public catalog at /status) or fully standalone (clean, header-and-footer-free, perfect for a customer-owned custom domain).

Every YouMonit user has at least one workspace (also called an account). Workspaces own monitors, channels, incidents, status pages and billing. A user can belong to many workspaces and switch between them instantly from the top bar.

Inviting a teammate

1. Open Workspace → Members.
2. Paste the e-mail. Pick a role (see below). Send invite.
3. They click the invite link, sign up or sign in, accept the invitation, and land in the workspace as a member.

Roles

• Owner — full control, including billing and deleting the workspace. Typically one per workspace.
• Admin — manage monitors, channels, members, status pages. No billing access.
• Editor — create/edit monitors and channels, but can't invite people or change billing.
• Billing — only the billing pages; useful for finance teammates who don't need monitor access.
• Viewer — read-only across the workspace.

Audit log

Every monitor change, channel change, member change and billing change is recorded in the workspace audit log — searchable, exportable and immutable.

Everything you can do in the UI is also one HTTPS call away. The API is REST v2, JSON in / JSON out, with code samples in cURL, PHP, JS, Python, Go, Ruby and Perl on the /api reference page.

Generate a token

1. Open Workspace → API keys.
2. Click New key, give it a label, save.
3. Copy the secret immediately — it's shown only once. Use it as a bearer token.

A typical call

curl -X POST https://www.youmonit.com/api/v2/monitors \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $YMONIT_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "type": "http",
    "name": "Storefront",
    "target": "https://shop.example.com",
    "interval_seconds": 60,
    "channel_ids": [12, 17]
  }'

Webhooks (push from YouMonit)

Add a webhook channel to any monitor. We POST a JSON payload with the full event context (monitor, status, error, response time, location) every time the monitor changes state. Retries use exponential back-off. Signed with a HMAC header so you can verify authenticity.

YouMonit is built and operated by Webmint s.r.o. in Prague, Czech Republic. All data is stored in the EU.

How we treat your data

• All traffic is over HTTPS (HSTS preloaded).
• Passwords are bcrypt-hashed; we can never read them.
• API tokens and webhook secrets are stored hashed at rest.
• Monitor configuration (URLs, headers, body) is kept private to your workspace — there is no cross-workspace sharing of any kind.
• Check-result history is retained per your plan's window, then rolled up into daily summaries.

Compliance

• GDPR-aligned data handling (EU controller / processor).
• Account deletion erases your data within 30 days.
• A signed DPA is available on request — write to us via /contact.

Reporting a vulnerability

Found something? Mail security@youmonit.com with a description and reproduction. We respond within one working day and treat all good-faith research as authorised — please give us a reasonable window to fix before public disclosure.

Turning on 2FA takes two minutes and is the single biggest security upgrade you can make to your account. We strongly recommend it for every Owner and Admin.

Enable it

1. Go to Profile → Two-factor authentication.
2. Click Set up 2FA. A QR code and a 16-character secret appear.
3. Open Google Authenticator, 1Password, Bitwarden, Authy or any other RFC 6238 app. Scan the QR (or paste the secret).
4. Type the 6-digit code your app shows back into YouMonit. 2FA is on the moment we accept the code.

Recovery codes

The moment 2FA is on, YouMonit shows you ten one-time recovery codes. Save them somewhere safe (password manager, printed copy). If you lose your phone, these are your only way back in. They're shown only once — you can always regenerate a fresh batch, which invalidates the old set immediately.

Logging in with 2FA on

After your password the login form prompts for the 6-digit code. If you lost the phone, the same form has a Use recovery code fallback.

YouMonit's distributed checker network runs across multiple data-centres. You can also run your own checker nodes — useful for private-network monitoring or for adding a region we don't yet cover.

What a checker is

A small Python 3 program that long-polls the YouMonit core for work, executes the assigned checks against the configured targets and posts results back. Outbound HTTPS only — no inbound ports.

Quick start

1. Provision a Linux VM (any modern distro, Python 3, 256 MB RAM is plenty).
2. Open Checkers → New in the YouMonit UI to mint a checker key.
3. Follow the on-page instructions to install httpx, drop the reference checker into /opt/youmonit/, put the key in /etc/youmonit/checker.env and start it as a systemd service.
4. Within ~30 seconds the new node appears on the Checkers page with a fresh last-seen timestamp.

Alternatives to systemd

If you don't have systemd (shared hosting, BSD, init-less containers) a cron-driven runner wrapped in flock works equally well — the on-page instructions show the exact crontab line and lock-file dance to prevent double-starting.

Pinning monitors to your node

Set a location label when you start the checker (YMON_LOCATION=fra1-internal). Any monitor you tag with that location runs only on your node. Useful for behind-the-firewall checks.