// guide
Signup to a verified alert on your own phone, using one URL and the free plan. The point is to prove the delivery path before you depend on it.
5 min · no prior setup · updated 23 August 2026
Most monitoring setups are never tested end to end. People connect a service, see green, and assume the alert will arrive when it matters. Then the first real incident is also the first test of the delivery path, and that is a bad time to discover the email went to spam.
This guide does the opposite: prove delivery first, on the free plan, in about five minutes.
One production URL. That is it — no cloud credentials, no agent, no card.
Pick something that is genuinely load-bearing but not your marketing homepage: a health endpoint, an API root, the page that breaks when your database is down. If the URL still returns 200 when your product is broken, it is the wrong URL, and that is worth knowing now rather than during an outage.
Sign up with an email you actually read on your phone. Confirm the link.
Beaam creates a default email notification channel from your signup address automatically, so there is nothing to configure before an alert can reach you.
Paste it. Beaam starts checking every minute immediately.
Behind the scenes it is deciding up or down on more than a status code: any HTTP response counts as reachable, while a network error or a timeout counts as down. Response time over 10 seconds is treated as degraded rather than broken, because a slow endpoint and a dead one are different problems.
Within a minute or two you will see the service move from unknown to a real state. This matters more than it looks: it confirms the whole collection path is working — that Beaam can reach your URL from outside your network, and that scheduling is running.
If it stays unknown for several minutes, the endpoint is probably not reachable from the public internet. Check that first before anything else.
From your notification settings, send a test alert.
This is the step that makes the difference. It exercises the real delivery path: Beaam renders a real alert, sends it through your real channel, records the outcome in the delivery ledger, and waits for the provider to confirm it actually landed rather than merely being accepted.
Check your phone. If it did not arrive within a minute, check spam and add the sender to your contacts — do that now, while it is a test, not at 3am.
Email is fine for a first proof, but mail is not a paging channel: it is batched, filtered and easy to miss overnight.
Add Slack — free on every plan, and it reaches a place you already watch. A generic webhook is there too if you page through something of your own. SMS is on the Solo plan.
Native push, with alerts that pierce Do Not Disturb, arrives with the Beaam mobile app. It is built and not yet in the app stores; there is nothing to install today.
That is the entire chain. Most monitoring setups have never verified more than the first link.
Honest limits. You have not proved the thresholds are right for your service — that takes days of real traffic. You have not proved Beaam catches your specific failure mode; one URL sees one thing. And a single HTTP check will not see a failing background job, a webhook backlog or replica lag, all of which happily return 200 on the front door.
Those need real integrations, which is the next step — and the free plan covers two, so you can add your most important providers without paying.