# Getting Started

### Creating your first monitor

To get started, we will create a simple HTTP status code based monitor.

#### Choose URL to monitor

* Go to **Monitors** → **Create monitor**
* Enter an easy to remember and recognize name for the monitor in the first text field.
* Select the Ping protocol as `HTTP(S)`
* Enter your URL or IP address in the **URL** text field
* Click **Save** to save the monitor with default settings or Click on **Advanced settings.**

### Advanced  Settings

#### Ping locations

You can choose the Ping locations from which your url will be checked. The default is `North Virginia`.

{% hint style="info" %}
Currently, there is only one Ping location available. We are in the process of adding more locations and when added, you will be able to add more Ping servers.
{% endhint %}

#### Notifications

You can select different notification handlers (Integrations) and when your monitor 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 monitor.

#### 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.

#### Check Interval

You can configure the Check interval, which defines how often the monitor needs to be pinged.

The default is 10 Minutes but you can change it to one of the following options:

* 1 minute
* 3 minutes
* 5 minutes
* 10 minutes
* 30 minutes
* 1 hour

#### Request Timeout

You can configure the request timeout for the monitors. 

The default is 5 Seconds but you can change it to one of the following options:

* 1 second
* 2 seconds
* 3 seconds
* 5 seconds
* 10 seconds

### Custom request & responses

Hydrozen.io uses`GET` requests by default to check for the availability of the monitors. 

But you can completely customise the requests and the expected responses.