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Quickstart

Publish a status page, attach the services it reports on, and put it on your own domain.

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This walks you from an empty account to a live status page on your own domain, reporting real check results. It takes about ten minutes, most of which is waiting for DNS.

Create your account

Register at dash.statusowl.net/register with an email address and password. No card is required — the Free plan is a real plan, not a countdown. It includes one status page, a custom domain with automatic SSL, 25 monitors on a 3-minute interval, and 30 days of history.

Create the status page

  1. Go to Status Pages → New Page.
  2. Give the page a name and pick a subdomain. acme becomes acme.statusowl.app.
  3. Click Create. The page is live at that URL immediately.

Subdomains are globally unique, validated for format, and a reserved-word blocklist keeps common names out of circulation. Full detail in Create a status page.

Add the services the page reports on

A page with no services is an empty page. Each row on your status page is a monitor you attach to it.

  1. Go to Monitors → New Monitor.
  2. Pick a type:
    • HTTP / HTTPS for websites and APIs (details).
    • Port (TCP) for databases, brokers, mail and SSH (details).
    • Ping (ICMP) for bare host reachability (details).
  3. Enter the target — https://acme.com, db.acme.com:5432, or a hostname.
  4. Pick a check interval. Your plan sets the floor: 3 minutes on Free, 60 seconds on Starter, 30 seconds on Growth and Scale.
  5. Click Create Monitor. The first check runs within seconds.

Then open the status page, find the Components card, and click Add Component to attach each monitor. Name monitors the way your customers would name the service — the monitor's name is the label the public sees. See Services on your page.

HEAD requests for large pages

For an HTTP monitor against a heavy HTML page, set the method to HEAD. The check still validates the status code and the TLS handshake, but skips downloading the body — less bandwidth, and a response-time graph that measures your server rather than your page weight.

Turn on automatic incidents

This is the part that makes the page maintain itself.

  1. Open the status page → Settings.
  2. Turn on Auto-create incidents on monitor failure.
  3. Pick the default impact for automatically-opened incidents.

After three consecutive failed checks on an attached monitor, StatusOwl opens an incident on the page, seeds a first update saying it was detected automatically, and resolves it with a recovery update on the first successful check. It is off by default. See Automatic incidents.

A failing check does not notify anyone yet

Automatic incidents update the page. They do not send you a message. Today the only thing that dispatches to Email, Slack, Discord, Teams, ntfy or a webhook is a Watch Owl host-metric alert rule. Uptime alerting is being built — see the roadmap — and until it ships, treat the status page as the source of truth rather than your pager.

Put it on your own domain

status.acme.com reads better than acme.statusowl.app, and it is available on every plan including Free.

  1. Open the status page → Custom Domain card.
  2. Enter the hostname and click Add domain.
  3. Publish the DNS records the dashboard prints — an ownership TXT, then a CNAME pointing at status-pages.statusowl.app.

The card polls every 10 seconds. Once the records resolve, Cloudflare validates ownership and issues a certificate. Nothing to install, nothing to renew. Full walkthrough, apex-domain notes and troubleshooting in Custom domains.

Make it look like yours

Upload a logo, choose light, dark or auto, and decide which panels the page shows — uptime bars, response times, incident history. Visitors get their own theme toggle regardless of the default you pick. See Branding and themes.

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