# Getting Started

### Creating your first heartbeat monitor

Let's create your first heartbeat monitor for a Cron job.

#### Create a heartbeat

* Go to **Heartbeats** → **Create heartbeat**
* Enter an easy to remember and recognize name for the heartbeat in the first text field.
* Change the **Expect a heartbeat every** value to your desired frequency. (Default: 1 hour)
* Enter the Grace period. (Default: 5 minutes)
* Click **Create** to save the monitor or Click on **Advanced settings.**
* **Copy the secret URL** on the Heartbeat detail page and configure it to your Cron job or any other scheduled job in such a way it pings this url in the specified duration that we have configured.
* If the system doesn't receive the ping within that duration, it will wait till the grace period and if still not received, it will trigger a down alert and send it to the configured notificaion handlers.

{% hint style="info" %}
This heartbeat will expect us to make either a GET or POST request. to the URL provided
{% endhint %}

### Advanced  Settings

#### Notifications

You can select different notification handlers (Integrations) and when your heartbeat status changes (UP/DOWN), the alerts will be sent to the selected notification handlers.

If you are configuring for the first time, there won't be any notification handlers available by default. You have to first Create a Notification Handler and come back here to add. 

#### Email reports

You can enable / disable weekly email reports for this specific heartbeat.

#### Projects

You can tag this monitor to a Project. Projects are an easiest way to categorize, tag and filter your different monitors, heartbeats, domains and statupages.

It will be empty by default, you need to create a new project and come back here to configure it.

####


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