<h2 id="whatispingbot">What is Ping Bot?</h2>
<p>Ping Bot is a robust uptime monitor that acts as your digital watchdog, keeping an eye on all of your web assets. Whether it's your marketing website, app, database, infrastructure, or even third-party dependencies that your applications use, Ping Bot is here to ensure everything is running smoothly.</p>
<h2 id="whatcanpingbotdo">What can Ping Bot do?</h2>
<p>We designed Ping Bot to be the go-to place for when your app or dependencies go down. This means that Ping Bot is not just a simple uptime monitor, but a comprehensive incident management tool that helps you diagnose and resolve issues faster. You'll get detailed uptime and response time reports, as well as alerts when things go wrong.</p>
<p><img src="https://s3.pingbot.dev/images/articles/introducing-ping-bot-v1-0-1.png" alt="Monitor ping tab"></p>
<p>With most apps these days having some form of integration or external dependencies, whether it’s using OpenAI’s API, Vercel for hosting, or MongoDB Cloud for your database, Ping Bot aggregates detailed incident information from hundreds of sources to give you a comprehensive view of what’s happening.</p>
<p><img src="https://s3.pingbot.dev/images/articles/introducing-ping-bot-v1-0-2.png" alt="Monitor overview tab"></p>
<p>Ping Bot comes packed with features designed to make your life easier:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Custom Monitoring</strong>: Ping Bot keeps a constant check on your web assets, ensuring they're up and running. In the event of an outage, Ping Bot springs into action, alerting you to the problem at hand.</li>
<li><strong>Vendor Monitoring</strong>: Ping Bot pulls data from hundreds of the most popular vendors and services, allowing you to see current and historical uptime and incident data. Was your app down a few hours ago? Ping Bot will help you figure out why.</li>
<li><strong>Incident Tracking</strong>: When things go south, Ping Bot provides you with detailed incident information, helping you diagnose and resolve the issue faster.</li>
<li><strong>Configurable Alerts</strong>: It turns out that some vendors (i.e. Cloudflare) have <em>lots</em> of incidents, most of them being minor. To ensure you're not inundated with alerts, Ping Bot allows you to filter them by severity or subcomponent, letting you focus on only those that truly matters to your team.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="gettingstarted">Getting Started</h2>
<p>Ping Bot is free to use and takes less than 2 minutes to get set up. You can use either the free plan forever, or upgrade to get access to more monitors, vendors, and alerting features.</p>
<p>To start, <a target="_blank" rel="noopener" href="https://app.pingbot.dev/signup">sign up</a> your organization for an account by entering the org name, website, and your desired account information. From there, we’ll create your first monitor to get you going!</p>
<p>The main page will give you an overview of your account, including stats like global ping time, recent incidents, and a quick view of the historical uptime of your monitors.</p>
<p><img src="https://s3.pingbot.dev/images/articles/introducing-ping-bot-v1-0-3.png" alt="Monitor dashboard"></p>
<p>For upgraded or trial accounts, we’d suggest you add all of your 3rd party vendors right away to start getting notifications for when they’re down, which is where many of our early users get most of the value. We’d also suggest adding a filter to only see the incidents you care about - for some vendors there can be a lot of them!</p>
<h2 id="alertsandnotifications">Alerts and Notifications</h2>
<p>When an incident occurs, Ping Bot will alert you via your preferred method of communication, be it email, SMS, or webhook notifications. One of the most frustrating parts of many other uptime monitors is the number of alerts you get for things that don't actuallly matter to you. Ping Bot solves this by allowing you to filter alerts by severity or subcomponent, ensuring you only get notifications for the incidents that matter most to you.</p>
<p><img src="https://s3.pingbot.dev/images/articles/introducing-ping-bot-v1-0-4.png" alt="Incident filters"></p>
<p>Ping Bot can also be used as an internal status page for you and your team. In the dashboard we'll display the current status of your monitors, as well as any ongoing incidents or upcoming maintenance. This can be shared with your team or customers to keep them in the loop.</p>
<h2 id="advancedusagetips">Advanced Usage Tips</h2>
<p>While we created Ping Bot to be easy to use, we also wanted to make sure it was powerful enough for the most demanding of use-cases. Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of Ping Bot:</p>
<ul>
<li><strong>Groups</strong>: If you have a lot of monitors, you can group them together to make it easier to manage. For example, you could group all of your marketing website monitors together, or all of your database monitors. This way you can see the status of all of your monitors at a glance. Or, if you're a development agency, you could group all of your client's monitors together to make it easier to manage and view.</li>
<li><strong>Webhooks</strong>: If you have an internal system that you'd like to integrate with Ping Bot, you can use webhooks to send alerts to your internal systems. This way you can automatically create a ticket in your ticketing system, or save incident data to your internal database.</li>
<li><strong>Alert Settings</strong>: Change the monitor interval, alerting threshold, and renotify interval to better suit your needs. For example, if you know that a certain system takes a while to recover, you can increase the renotify interval to avoid spamming your inbox with too many alerts.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="whatsnext">What's Next?</h2>
<p>We can't wait to get Ping Bot v1.0 out into the world and see how it helps you and your team. We're constantly working on new features and improvements, with a ton of useful tools launching soon, so if you have any feedback or suggestions, please don't hesitate to reach out to us at <a href="mailto:support@pingbot.dev">support@pingbot.dev</a>.</p>


Introducing Ping Bot v1.0