# What Pingtower is
Source: https://www.pingtower.com/docs/
Point your services at Pingtower. When something breaks, the alert reaches your phone the moment it opens. Ack it, resolve it, or read the log lines behind it, without opening a laptop.
## How the pieces fit
Pingtower is two halves. The **service** is the inbound half: it ingests structured log lines, recovers each message's shape, evaluates your rules, and keeps alert state with re-notify escalation until someone acknowledges. The **iOS app** is the outbound half: it is what actually wakes a human at 3 a.m.
Anything that can make an HTTP request can be a source: an application, a cron job, a log shipper, or the [addons agent](/docs/addons/) probing something from the outside.
## What it is not
- **Not an uptime prober.** The service itself runs no HTTP, TCP or ping checks, and nothing in it alerts on silence. Outside-in checks are the [addons agent's](/docs/addons/) job, and its measurements arrive as ordinary events.
- **Not a status page.** Pingtower tells you first. Telling your customers is a different product.
- **Not a ticketing system.** An alert opens, gets acked, gets resolved. That is the whole lifecycle.
- **Not a dashboard you have to remember to check.** If you are looking at Pingtower, it is because it paged you.
## Where it runs
The service is hosted at **api.pingtower.com**. Accounts, tenants, memberships and push live there, and signups are open and free during preview. If you would rather keep alert data on hardware you own, run the daemon yourself and [pair it](/docs/self-hosting/relay/) from the app: your box keeps the sources, logs and alerts, and pingtower.com only relays the page to your phone.
Hosted firstEverything in these docs works on the hosted service without installing anything. Self-hosting and the addons agent are optional layers on top.
## Where things are
- [Getting started](/docs/getting-started/quickstart/): quickstart, the seven nouns, and the three kinds of credential.
- [The service](/docs/service/): ingest, rules, alerts, integrations, actions, on-call, reports, team, plans.
- [iOS app](/docs/ios/): install, the feed, critical alerts, pairing.
- [Self-hosting](/docs/self-hosting/): what is hosted and what is not, installing the daemon, TLS, the relay.
- [Addons agent](/docs/addons/): install, configure, every addon and sensor.
- [Reference](/docs/reference/): errors, rate limits, and links to the generated API reference.
- [FAQ](/docs/help/faq/) and [troubleshooting](/docs/help/troubleshooting/).
## Every page
### Getting started
- [What Pingtower is](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/index.md): Point your services at Pingtower. When something breaks, the alert reaches your phone the moment it opens. Ack it, resolve it, or read the log lines behind it, without opening a laptop.
- [Quickstart](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/getting-started/quickstart/index.md): From nothing to an alert on your phone in five steps. You need a terminal, and the iOS app if you want the phone to ring.
- [Concepts](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/getting-started/concepts/index.md): Seven nouns. Everything else in the docs is built out of these.
- [Credentials](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/getting-started/credentials/index.md): Three kinds of bearer token, each with a prefix that makes it impossible to hand one where another belongs.
### The service
- [The service](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/service/index.md): The inbound half. It ingests structured log lines, recovers each message's shape, evaluates declarative rules, and keeps alert state with re-notify escalation until a human acknowledges.
- [Ingest](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/service/ingest/index.md): One endpoint, one JSON object per line, one bearer token per source. Everything Pingtower knows starts here.
- [Rules](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/service/rules/index.md): A rule says what to look for, how much of it is a problem, and what to do about it. Rules are per project, declarative, and editable from the phone.
- [Alerts & escalation](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/service/alerts/index.md): An alert has three states and two verbs. Everything about paging follows from that.
- [Log tail & templates](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/service/logtail/index.md): The actual lines behind an alert, filtered to the shape that matched. Kept only for sources that ask for it.
- [Projects & sources](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/service/projects/index.md): A project is a namespace inside a tenant. A source is one thing that sends into it, with its own token.
- [Integrations](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/service/integrations/index.md): Tell something other than your phone. Every integration keeps a per-event delivery log, so when Slack goes quiet you can see whether it was you or them.
- [Actions](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/service/actions/index.md): A runbook action is an HTTP call the service makes for you when an alert opens. Restart the worker, open the ticket, flip the feature flag, before anyone wakes up.
- [On-call schedules](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/service/oncall/index.md): A schedule answers "who is on call right now". Rules name schedules in their escalation ladders, so the rule never changes when the rota does.
- [Reports](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/service/reports/index.md): A running incident report with a shareable status page. Write it in Markdown from the phone while the incident is still going.
- [Team & account](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/service/team/index.md): Invite teammates, manage members, mint and revoke API keys, and read the audit log of who did what.
- [Plans & quotas](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/service/plans/index.md): Limits are per tenant. Usage against them is on the Account → Plan & usage screen in the app and at GET /v1/tenants/{tid}/plan.
### The iOS app
- [The iOS app](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/ios/index.md): A native pager for your alerts. The feed updates live, one swipe acks, and critical alerts sound through Silent mode.
- [Install & sign in](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/ios/install/index.md): Get the app, sign up with an email and password, then create or join a tenant.
- [The alert feed](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/ios/feed/index.md): One list, updating while you watch it. Ack and resolve by swiping. Everything an alert carries is one tap away.
- [Critical alerts](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/ios/critical/index.md): A 3 a.m. page you sleep through is not a page. An escalation is delivered with Apple's critical-alert entitlement, which sounds at full volume through Silent mode, Do Not Disturb and every Focus.
- [Pairing your own box](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/ios/pairing/index.md): Redeem a join code from a self-hosted daemon and the app opens that tenant directly, while pingtower.com relays the pages.
### Self-hosting
- [Self-hosting](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/self-hosting/index.md): What is hosted, what you can run yourself, and where the line is drawn and why.
- [Install the daemon](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/self-hosting/install/index.md): A single static Go binary on a Linux box, verified before it runs, under systemd, with its data in one directory of SQLite files.
- [Reverse proxy & TLS](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/self-hosting/proxy/index.md): The daemon serves plain HTTP on localhost. One line of Caddy, or a small nginx block, puts a certificate in front of it.
- [Relay & pairing](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/self-hosting/relay/index.md): How a box you run pages a phone it cannot push to. The box calls out; pingtower.com forwards; nothing calls in.
### The addons agent
- [The addons agent](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/addons/index.md): A single Go binary you install on external servers. It runs addons, small tasks that measure something about a target, on a schedule, and reports the measurements to the tower as ordinary events. Your rules do the rest.
- [Install](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/addons/install/index.md): One command on a fresh Linux box, after you have verified what you are about to run.
- [Configure](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/addons/config/index.md): One YAML file. The agent refuses to start on anything it does not understand, which is the point.
- [httpcheck](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/addons/httpcheck/index.md): Fetch a URL and time every stage of it separately, because a slow resolver and a slow server wake up different people.
- [tcpcheck](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/addons/tcpcheck/index.md): Connect to a port and say how long it took, with DNS timed apart from the connect.
- [dnscheck](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/addons/dnscheck/index.md): Resolve a name, optionally against a specific resolver, and check what came back.
- [tlscert](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/addons/tlscert/index.md): Complete a TLS handshake and report how long the leaf certificate has left. Reported on every run, so the threshold lives in a rule, not the agent.
- [icmpping](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/addons/icmpping/index.md): Send a few pings and report round-trip and loss.
- [hostmetrics](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/addons/hostmetrics/index.md): CPU, load, memory, swap and paging on the box the agent runs on. Unprivileged, Linux only, reads a handful of files under /proc.
- [sshcheck](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/addons/sshcheck/index.md): Open an SSH session with a key, optionally run one command, and time every stage. Key-based auth only.
- [portscan](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/addons/portscan/index.md): Scan a host's ports and compare against a baseline. Needs nmap.
- [traceroute](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/addons/traceroute/index.md): Trace the path to a host and notice when it changes. Needs traceroute.
- [logwatch](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/addons/logwatch/index.md): Tail a local file for a pattern. Counts matches, notices rotation, and never sends a line off the box.
- [securityupdates](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/addons/securityupdates/index.md): Count pending package updates on a Debian host, and whether it wants a reboot. Reads only; never installs anything.
- [Sensors](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/addons/sensors/index.md): Checks run on a schedule. Sensors run continuously, subscribed to the kernel, and report the moment something happens on the box the agent runs on.
### Reference
- [Reference](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/reference/index.md): Every endpoint, generated from the server's own route table and gated against drift.
- [API reference](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/reference/api/index.md): Every endpoint on Pingtower's ingest and API-key data planes, generated from the daemon's own route table.
- [Errors](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/reference/errors/index.md): Every non-2xx response is a JSON object with an error string. Some carry more.
- [Rate limits](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/reference/limits/index.md): Per-plan rates on the ingest and data planes, and fixed limits on the routes that take a password.
### Help
- [FAQ](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/help/faq/index.md): Short answers. Each one links to the page with the long one.
- [Troubleshooting](https://www.pingtower.com/docs/help/troubleshooting/index.md): The symptom, what it usually means, and the one command that tells you.