Getting started with Beacon

Beacon monitors your services and pages the right person when something breaks. Setup takes about ten minutes.

1. Create your first monitor

Add an HTTP monitor for your main app URL (Monitors → New). The default check interval is 60 seconds from three regions; a check fails when it times out (10s) or returns a non-2xx status.

2. Set up an escalation policy

Under Alerting → Escalation policies, define who gets paged and in what order. A sensible starting policy:

1. Notify the on-call engineer (push + SMS)
2. After 5 minutes unacknowledged → notify the whole engineering channel
3. After 15 minutes → phone call to the fallback contact

3. Connect your channels

Beacon ships integrations for Slack, PagerDuty-style phone/SMS, email, and generic webhooks. Most teams start with Slack + SMS.

4. Invite your team

Alerts are only useful if they reach people. Invite teammates under Settings → Members — viewers are free on every plan.

That's it. Your first incident will be handled better than your last one.