Quick Start

This guide walks you through creating your first synthetic monitor with Yorker. You can use the Web UI for a visual approach or the CLI for infrastructure-as-code workflows.

Sign up

To get started, create an account at yorkermonitoring.com. After signing in, you land on the dashboard where you can create monitors, view results, and configure alerts.

Pick a monitor type

Yorker supports three monitor types:

• HTTP: sends an HTTP request and asserts on the response (status, body, headers, timing, SSL, OpenAPI conformance).
• Browser: runs a real Chromium session, either against a URL with automatic Core Web Vitals capture, or scripted with Playwright.
• MCP: exercises a Model Context Protocol server over Streamable HTTP, validates the advertised tools, and (optionally) calls them with expected output.

You can create monitors through the Web UI, the CLI, or via natural language.

Create your first monitor (Web UI)

1. Open the dashboard and click Create Monitor.
2. Select HTTP, Browser, or MCP.
3. Enter the target URL (or MCP endpoint).
4. Choose one or more check locations.
5. Set the check frequency (default: every 5 minutes).
6. Click Create.

The monitor starts running immediately. Results appear on the dashboard within one check interval.

For a richer walkthrough (assertions, auth, browser scripts, MCP tool calls), see Create a Monitor.

Create your first monitor (CLI)

To manage monitors as code, use the Yorker CLI. The full flow is four commands:

$ npm install -g @yorker/cli
$ yorker login            # opens browser, click Authorize
$ yorker init             # scaffold yorker.config.yaml
$ yorker deploy           # ship the monitor

Install the CLI

npm install -g @yorker/cli

On macOS or Linux you can also install with Homebrew:

brew install reverse-sweep-ltd/tap/yorker

Authenticate

For interactive use, run yorker login. The CLI prints a short XXXX-XXXX code and opens your browser to a URL of the form https://yorkermonitoring.com/cli/auth?code=XXXX-XXXX. The code is one-time and short-lived (10-minute TTL), so visiting /cli/auth without it, or with an expired or already-used code, just shows an invalid-request page. Confirm the code matches what you see in the terminal, click Authorize, and the CLI picks up a fresh API key labelled CLI <hostname> and writes it to ~/.yorker/credentials (mode 0600). You can revoke the key any time from Settings > API Keys in the dashboard, or with yorker logout --revoke.

yorker login

For CI scripts, Docker containers, and other headless contexts, set YORKER_API_KEY instead of running yorker login. Generate the key from Settings > API Keys in the dashboard:

export YORKER_API_KEY=sk_...

The CLI resolves auth in this order: YORKER_API_KEY, then ~/.yorker/credentials. See the CLI reference for the full auth resolution rules.

Scaffold a config file

yorker init

The interactive wizard creates a yorker.config.yaml with your project name, first monitor URL, type, and frequency. You can also pass flags to skip the prompts:

yorker init --name my-app --url https://example.com --type http --frequency 5m

Deploy

yorker deploy

The CLI validates your config, computes a diff against the current remote state, and applies changes. You will see a Terraform-style plan showing what will be created, updated, or deleted before any changes are applied.

View results

Check the status of your monitors:

yorker status

Or stream results in real time:

yorker results tail "Homepage"

Open the dashboard to see check results, response times, and status history. Each check result includes timing breakdowns (DNS, TLS, TTFB) and, for browser monitors, a filmstrip screenshot view.

Next steps

• Create a Monitor: HTTP, browser, and MCP monitors, assertions, auth, labels.
• Set Up Alerts: consecutive failures, multi-location correlation, SSL alerts, burn-rate alerts.
• Define SLOs: availability and performance objectives with error budgets and burn rate alerts.
• Deploy with CLI: manage your full monitoring config as code with yorker deploy.
• Install Dashboards: one-click provisioning of pre-built HyperDX / ClickStack dashboards.