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Getting Started

This guide walks you through setting up Sentro from scratch -- creating your account, adding your first monitor, and configuring alerts so you get notified when something goes down.

1. Create an account​

Sign up at app.sentro.dev. You can register with email/password or sign in with Google or GitHub. After signing up, you will be asked to create an organization -- this is your workspace where monitors, alerts, and team members live.

2. Create your first monitor​

From the dashboard, click Create Monitor. Fill in:

  • Name -- A descriptive label (e.g., "Production API" or "Marketing Site").
  • URL -- The endpoint to monitor (e.g., https://api.example.com/health).
  • Monitor type -- HTTP is the default and works for most web services. Choose TCP, PING, or DNS for other use cases.
  • Check interval -- How often to check (minimum depends on your plan).

Click Create and the monitor starts checking immediately. You will see the first result within seconds.

What to monitor first​

If you are not sure where to start:

  • Your main website homepage.
  • Your API health endpoint (e.g., /health or /status).
  • Your database via TCP on the database port.
  • Any critical third-party services your app depends on.

3. Set up an alert channel​

A monitor without alerts only records data -- you need to be notified when something fails. Go to Alerts in the sidebar and create a channel:

  • Email is the simplest -- enter the email addresses of the people who should be notified.
  • Webhook if you want to send alerts to a custom endpoint.
  • Slack sends alerts to a Slack channel via an incoming webhook URL.

4. Create an alert rule​

After creating a channel, create a rule that connects it to your monitors:

  • Trigger: DOWN -- Fires when a monitor detects that an endpoint is unreachable.
  • Channel -- Select the channel you just created.
  • Monitor -- Leave empty to apply to all monitors, or select a specific one.
  • Consecutive failures -- Set to 1 to be told as soon as an outage is confirmed, or higher to hold this channel back until the outage has persisted.

Consider also creating a UP trigger rule on the same channel so you get notified when things recover.

Brief blips are already filtered out before this point: by default a monitor waits for two checks in a row to agree before recording an outage at all. You can change that per monitor with its confirmations setting.

5. Explore the dashboard​

Your dashboard gives you an overview of all monitors at a glance:

  • Up/Down/Paused counts -- How many monitors are in each state.
  • Active incidents -- Ongoing outages that have not been resolved yet.
  • Recent incidents -- Outages from the last 24 hours.
  • Average latency -- Response time across all monitors.

Click into any monitor to see its check history, latency charts, and daily statistics.

What to do next​