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Recipe: get an alert when your website is down

Hermes checks your website every hour and sends you a Telegram message only when something is wrong. When the site works, you hear nothing.
Time needed 5 minutes
You need A Hermes agent with Telegram connected and a home channel set (see Schedule a recurring task)
Result An hourly check, and a Telegram alert when your site does not answer

1. Ask Hermes to create the check

In the dashboard CHAT (or any chat with Hermes), write your website's address and what you want:

Create a scheduled job named 'Shop website check': every hour, check that https://www.example.com opens (HTTP 200). If it does not, send me an alert on Telegram with the error. If it works, send nothing.

Hermes writes a small check program, creates the job (1), runs the check once and tells you the result (2). (In our test we checked https://www.wikipedia.org.)

Hermes creates the website check

Why it costs almost nothing

For a simple check like this, Hermes creates a script-only job (no_agent in CRON): the check runs without asking the AI model, so it does not use your AI credit. The AI is only used when you ask Hermes to create or change it.

2. Test the alert

You want to be sure the alert really arrives. Ask Hermes for a one-time test with an address that does not exist:

To test the alert, create a one-off job named 'Alert test' that runs in 1 minute, checks https://shop.example.invalid the same way as 'Shop website check', and sends me the alert on Telegram.

  1. Your request.
  2. Hermes explains what the alert will say, for example ALERT: https://shop.example.invalid is unreachable.

Hermes sets up an alert test

A minute later, the alert arrives on Telegram.

3. See both jobs

Open CRON:

  1. Shop website check runs Every 1 h, repeat: forever. While the site works, each run is silent.
  2. Alert test ran once and shows completed.

The check and the alert test

Click the lightning icon on a job to run it now.

Check that it worked

  • The Alert test message arrived on Telegram.
  • Shop website check shows a Last time and no message was sent (your site works).
  • In LOGS, COMPONENT → CRON shows empty stdout — silent run for the normal check and delivered to telegram for the alert test.

Make it yours

  • Check several pages: "also check https://www.example.com/shop and /contact".
  • Check more often: "every 15 minutes".
  • Also check that a word appears on the page: "alert me if the page does not contain 'Add to cart'".

Common problems

I get an alert but the site works in my browser

The agent's server could not reach the site. Some sites or firewalls block requests from servers. Ask Hermes "run the Shop website check now and show me the error" to see the reason.

I do not want the test job any more

It ran once and stays as completed. Delete it with the bin icon in CRON.

Next steps