Quick start
From nothing to a live status page in about two minutes
On this page8
InBrief gives your customers one place to check whether your service is working, and gives your team one place to say so. This guide takes you from a fresh account to a public page with a monitored service on it. Everything you set up here can be changed later, except the page's address.
What you get
- A public status page with a current state for every service, uptime history and a subscribe box.
- Monitors that check your services from outside your infrastructure and tell your team first.
- Incidents and scheduled maintenance, written once and published in every language your page uses.
- Email and chat updates for subscribers. Browser notifications are in early access, switched on per account; WhatsApp alerts are coming soon.
- Badges, a website widget, an outage page and a JSON API for your own surfaces.
1. Choose your address
Signing in for the first time drops you into a short setup. It asks for your company or product name and
suggests the address of your page from it: your-slug.inbrief.sh. Edit the address if you want
another one; it takes lowercase letters, digits and single hyphens.
This one cannot be changed later. It is the address that ends up in your customers' bookmarks, in the badge in your README and in the RSS feed people subscribe to, so it is deliberately fixed. Pick the name of the company or the product, not of a team or a quarter. If you plan to serve the page on your own domain as well, you still choose a slug now; both addresses keep working (see Custom domain).
2. Choose your languages
Pick the language the page is written in, and any others you want it published in. One of them is your default language: the one you write incidents in, and the one everything else is translated from. See Languages.
3. Add your first monitor
A monitor is one thing we check on a schedule. Give it a name your customers will recognise (“Checkout API”, not “prod-lb-03”) and the address to check. The first check runs within a minute of saving, so you do not have to wait out a full interval to find out whether you typed the URL correctly.
The setup asks for a website URL because that is what most people start with. The full form, with ports, DNS records, pings, mail servers, sockets and cron jobs, is in Monitors.
4. Open your page
That is a working status page. The icon beside the page name at the top of the dashboard sidebar opens it in a new tab so you can see exactly what a customer sees: current state per service, uptime history, and a Get updates button.
What is worth doing next, roughly in the order it pays off:
- Branding: your logo, colour and typeface, so it reads as yours rather than as ours.
- Slack: so your own team hears about a failure before your customers do.
- Custom domain: so it lives at
status.yourbrand.com. - Incidents: worth reading before you need it, not during.
Finding your way around the dashboard
The sidebar is organised by job. Monitors and Incidents are the two you open during an outage. Analytics and Internal are the two you read afterwards. Status page shapes the public page: appearance, languages, domain, embeds and the fallback page. Alerts holds every channel and your subscribers, and Account holds the account: general, team, access, audit log, billing.
The page switcher at the top of the sidebar shows which status page you are working on. One account can run several; see Run more than one status page.
What this account can use
A new account starts on a 14-day trial of released Cloud features, with no card required. Features that are coming soon are not included in trial access. When the trial ends you keep what you bought, and the dashboard tells you plainly when a screen needs a capability the account does not have. Before relying on a monitor allowance, an API or a custom domain, confirm the active configuration under Account → Billing. See Billing and capabilities.