This gets one monitor running and alerting. Five minutes, no card.

1. Create an account#

Sign up at app.observeone.com with an email address, Google, or GitHub. You land on the dashboard with a setup checklist in the sidebar.

The Free plan includes 10 monitors, a two-hour minimum check interval, 30 days of run history, one Autopilot suite of up to 3 tests, and 10 AI verifications a month.

2. Add a URL monitor#

Open URL Monitors, choose New, and fill in three things: a name, the URL, and how often to check it. Save.

The first check runs when the schedule next fires, so on a two-hour interval the monitor sits empty until then. To see a result now, open the monitor and run it by hand. The monitor page is also where response time, status history and past runs live.

Two hours is the Free floor for check frequency. Ask for anything tighter and the form refuses it; paid plans go down to 5 minutes, 1 minute, and 30 seconds.

3. Route the failures somewhere#

A monitor that fails quietly is not much use. Open Alert Channels, create one, and pick where it delivers: email, Slack, Discord, Microsoft Teams, Telegram, SMS, or a webhook URL.

Attach it to the monitor from the monitor's own Alerts tab. Send a test through obs alert-channel test <id> if you want to confirm the destination works before you rely on it.

4. Do the same from the terminal#

Install the CLI and log in:

npm install -g @observeone/cli
obs login

npm install -g @observeone/cli
obs login

obs login opens a browser and completes the OAuth flow. For CI or an agent, see the headless options in Install the CLI.

Now create a monitor without leaving the shell:

obs url-monitor create --name "Marketing site" --url https://example.com --interval "0 */2 * * *"
obs url-monitor list

obs url-monitor create --name "Marketing site" --url https://example.com --interval "0 */2 * * *"
obs url-monitor list

The interval is a cron expression. 0 */2 * * * is every two hours, which is what a Free account allows.

Where to go next#

Core concepts if the difference between a monitor, a check and a heartbeat is still fuzzy.
API Checks overview to assert on a response body rather than just reachability.
Config-as-code to keep monitors in a JSON file your repo owns, applied with obs apply.