Getting Started with Chirp

What is Chirp?

Chirp gives your project a public status page where your users can check if everything is working. When something breaks, they'll see it here instead of flooding your inbox asking "is it down?"

You also get uptime monitoring that checks your services automatically and creates incidents when something goes wrong.

Create your status page

After signing up, you'll land on the "Create Status Page" screen.

Pick a name for your page. This is what shows up at the top of your public page. Usually your product or company name.
Choose a subdomain. This becomes your status page URL: yourname.getchirp.dev. Keep it short and simple.
Select starter components (or skip this and add them later).

Hit create, and your status page is live. You can visit it right away at yourname.getchirp.dev.

Add components

Components are the parts of your system that you want to track. Think of them as the things your users care about: your website, your API, your dashboard, your database.

To add a component, go to the Overview page in your dashboard and click + Add in the Components section.

Each component has:

A name (like "Website" or "API")
An optional description (like "Landing page and public status pages")
A status (Operational, Degraded, Partial Outage, Major Outage, or Maintenance)

You can change the status anytime by clicking the dropdown next to each component.

Tip: Only add components your users care about. You don't need to list every microservice. If you have internal infrastructure you want to monitor but not show publicly, you can hide components using the visibility toggle (the eye icon) or from Settings > Public Page Display.

Set up monitors

Monitors automatically check your services and create incidents when something goes down. You don't have to do anything manually.

Go to Monitors in the sidebar and click Add Monitor.

HTTP monitors

The most common type. Enter a URL and Chirp will ping it every few minutes. If it doesn't respond (or returns an error), Chirp creates an incident automatically.

URL: The endpoint to check. Usually your homepage or a /health endpoint.
Check interval: How often to check. Free plan starts at 5 minutes.
Fail after / Recover after: How many consecutive failures before creating an incident (and how many successes before resolving it). Default is 1 for both, so you'll know immediately.

SSL monitors

Tracks when your SSL certificate expires and alerts you before it does. Enter your domain and Chirp checks the certificate every few hours.

Heartbeat monitors

For things that run on a schedule, like cron jobs or background workers. Instead of Chirp pinging your service, your service pings Chirp. If Chirp doesn't hear from it within the expected interval, it knows something's wrong.

After creating a heartbeat monitor, you'll get a unique URL. Add a curl call to your cron job that hits this URL after each successful run.

Linking monitors to components

When you create a monitor, you can link it to a component. This means the component's status will update automatically when the monitor detects an issue. No manual status changes needed.

Your public status page

Your public page at yourname.getchirp.dev shows:

Status banner at the top: "All quiet in the nest" when everything works, or a warning when something's off.
Component list with each component's current status and 7-day uptime history.
Active incidents with real-time updates.
Past incidents from the last few days.
Email subscription box so visitors can get notified when something changes.

The status banner always reflects reality. Even if you hide some components from the public page, the banner still accounts for them. It won't lie to your users.

Control what visitors see

Go to Settings > Public Page Display to customize your public page:

Component visibility: Toggle which components show up on the public page. Great for hiding internal infrastructure.
Incident history: Choose how many days of past incidents to show (3, 7, 14, 30 days) or hide the section entirely.
Email subscriptions: Show or hide the "Get notified" box.

There's a live preview on the right side of the settings so you can see changes before saving.

Email subscriptions

Visitors to your status page can subscribe to email updates. When you create or update an incident, subscribers get notified automatically.

Subscriptions use double opt-in: visitors enter their email, receive a confirmation link, and only start getting notifications after clicking it.

Slack and Discord notifications

On the Pro plan, you can send incident notifications to Slack or Discord channels.

Go to Settings > Integrations and add a webhook URL for your Slack or Discord channel. You can filter which events to send (incident created, updated, resolved, monitor up/down).

That's it. You're set up. If you have questions, check the FAQ or reach out.