Getting Started
Get your first asset monitored in under five minutes.
1. Create your account
Sign up at merlonix.com/pricing/ and start your 14-day free trial on the Starter tier. No credit card required during the trial.
Once you confirm your email, you land on the dashboard.
2. Add an asset
From the Assets tab, click Add asset and fill in:
| Field | What to enter |
|---|---|
| Label | A human-readable name, e.g. Client A — shop |
| Domain / IP | The hostname or IP being monitored, e.g. shop.clienta.com |
| Check interval | How often to run checks — 5 min for critical, 60 min for low-traffic |
| SSL monitoring | Enabled by default — tracks certificate expiry, key algorithm, and issuer chain |
| DNS monitoring | Enabled by default — detects record drift against a stored baseline |
Click Save. Merlonix enqueues the first check immediately.
3. Attest ownership (optional but recommended)
Attestation proves you have legitimate access to the domain. It unlocks higher-fidelity checks and removes the unverified badge from the asset.
- Go to Attestations → New attestation
- Pick your asset and method:
- DNS TXT record — add a
_merlonix-verify.<domain>TXT record with the token - HTTP file — serve a file at
/.well-known/merlonix-<token>.txt
- DNS TXT record — add a
- Click Verify now — Merlonix resolves or fetches the challenge immediately
Verification typically takes under 30 seconds once you have deployed the DNS record or file.
4. Read your first check result
After the first check runs (usually within seconds of saving the asset), open the asset detail page. You will see:
- SSL status —
ok,expiring_soon,expired, or a flagged anomaly likekey_downgrade - DNS status —
okor a drift classification such asA_record_changed - Days until expiry — a sparkline of the last 50 checks so you can spot gradual expiry trends
If the first check returns a warning or critical alert, an alert appears in the Alerts queue automatically.
5. Set up an alert channel
Go to Settings → Alert channels (or navigate to /app/settings) and add a destination:
- Email — your billing email is pre-filled; add team member addresses as needed
- Slack webhook — paste the Incoming Webhook URL from your Slack app settings
- Generic webhook — any HTTPS endpoint; requests are signed with
X-Merlonix-Signature: sha256=<hex>
Each channel lets you filter by severity so your 3 AM pager only fires on critical alerts.
Next: read Monitoring Concepts to understand how Merlonix classifies each check result and how severity levels are assigned.