What is a Service?
A service in Alert24 represents a single component of your infrastructure that you want to track, monitor, and report on. Services are the fundamental building block of everything in Alert24 — monitoring checks are attached to services, status pages display services, and incidents affect services.
Types of Services
Services can represent anything in your stack:
Your Own Infrastructure
- Production API
- Web application
- Database
- Background job processor
- Authentication service
Third-Party Providers
- Cloudflare CDN
- AWS S3 storage
- Stripe payment processing
- SendGrid email delivery
- Google Workspace
Internal Tools
- Admin dashboard
- CI/CD pipeline
- Monitoring infrastructure
- Internal APIs
Service Status
Every service has a status that reflects its current health:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Operational | Everything is working normally |
| Degraded Performance | The service is working but slower or partially impaired |
| Partial Outage | Some functionality is unavailable |
| Major Outage | The service is completely down |
| Under Maintenance | Planned maintenance is in progress |
Service status can be updated:
- Automatically — Monitoring checks detect issues and update the service status
- Manually — Team members update the status when they're aware of an issue
Services are Independent
A key concept: services exist independently of status pages and applications. You create a service once, then:
- Add it to one or more applications to track dependencies
- Display it on one or more status pages for customer visibility
- Attach one or more monitoring checks to automate health tracking
This means you don't need to duplicate work. A single "Production API" service can appear on your customer status page, belong to your "Customer Portal" application, and have both an HTTP check and an SSL certificate check attached to it.
Services vs. Monitoring Checks
It's important to understand the distinction:
- A service represents a component (e.g., "Production API")
- A monitoring check is an automated test (e.g., "HTTP GET to /health every 60 seconds")
One service can have multiple monitoring checks. For example, your Production API service might have:
- An HTTP check on the
/healthendpoint - An HTTP check on the
/api/v1/statusendpoint - An SSL certificate check
If any of these checks fail, the service status is updated accordingly.
Getting Started
- Creating Services — How to create and configure services
- Service Status — Understanding status types and automatic updates