---
title: 'Quick Start'
description: 'Create your first monitor and start monitoring in under 5 minutes.'
section: 'Getting Started'
canonical_url: 'https://yorkermonitoring.com/docs/getting-started'
---

# 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](https://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](/docs/guides/create-monitor).

## Create your first monitor (CLI)

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

```bash
$ 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

```bash
npm install -g @yorker/cli
```

### Authenticate

For interactive use, run `yorker login`. The command opens a browser to the consent page at [yorkermonitoring.com/cli/auth](https://yorkermonitoring.com/cli/auth), mints a real API key tied to your team 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`.

```bash
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:

```bash
export YORKER_API_KEY=sk_...
```

The CLI resolves auth in this order: the `--api-key` flag, then `YORKER_API_KEY`, then `~/.yorker/credentials`. See the [CLI reference](/docs/reference/cli#yorker-login) for the full auth resolution rules.

### Scaffold a config file

```bash
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:

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

### Deploy

```bash
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:

```bash
yorker status
```

Or stream results in real time:

```bash
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](/docs/guides/create-monitor) — HTTP, browser, and MCP monitors, assertions, auth, labels.
- [Set Up Alerts](/docs/guides/set-up-alerts) — consecutive failures, multi-location correlation, SSL alerts, burn-rate alerts.
- [Define SLOs](/docs/guides/define-slos) — availability and performance objectives with error budgets and burn rate alerts.
- [Deploy with CLI](/docs/guides/monitoring-as-code) — manage your full monitoring config as code with `yorker deploy`.
- [Install Dashboards](/docs/guides/install-dashboards) — one-click provisioning of pre-built HyperDX / ClickStack dashboards.