Free Incident Management Toolkit: Alerts, Automations, and Accountability
You don’t need to sign another enterprise contract to handle outages like an adult. This free incident management toolkit shows how to wire exit1.dev into the rest of your stack so you get ruthless visibility, clear ownership, and zero excuses.
Monitoring and alerting: the heartbeat
Start with the obvious: exit1.dev monitors everywhere that matters. Configure:
- HTTP checks for every public-facing endpoint.
- Cron monitors for data pipelines and background jobs (pair with the cron job monitoring guide).
- SSL and domain monitors to avoid self-inflicted downtime.
Route alerts into Slack and email. Use the webhook integration to trigger automation platforms like n8n or Zapier to open tickets the second an incident begins.
Automation: remove toil, not judgment
Automation should clear the runway for human decisions. Combine exit1.dev with:
- GitHub Actions that auto-roll back when a monitor fails right after a deploy.
- Status page updates via API calls triggered by exit1.dev webhooks.
- Incident ticket templates in Linear or Jira so every event captures the same metadata.
Tie the automations back to the free uptime monitor SLA reporting stack so stakeholders get consistent metrics.
Communication: clarity beats spin
Customer trust evaporates faster than uptime. Use this workflow:
- exit1.dev alert fires and posts to Slack.
- The comms lead copies the pre-written template from the free uptime monitor email alerts guide.
- Update the status page and pin the latest state in the incident channel.
Keep the updates short, timestamped, and free of speculation. Your audience cares about impact and recovery ETA, not your feelings.
Post-incident accountability: receipts or it didn’t happen
After recovery, export exit1.dev logs and attach them to the incident ticket. Review them in your retro alongside:
- The incident postmortem templates for structured follow-up.
- The best free website monitoring tool comparison to ensure your stack stays sharp.
Assign owners to every action item and set due dates on the spot. If a task doesn’t have an owner, it’s fantasy.
The result: enterprise-grade resilience without enterprise invoices
This toolkit isn’t theoretical. It’s how lean teams ship reliable software while keeping finance off their backs. exit1.dev is the spine. Plug in the right automations, keep communication brutally honest, and you’ll outrun teams burning cash on bloated incident suites.
Morten Pradsgaard is the founder of exit1.dev — the free uptime monitor for people who actually ship. He writes no-bullshit guides on monitoring, reliability, and building software that doesn't crumble under pressure.