# Getting started with InfraNest > Welcome to InfraNest. When you sign up, a short setup wizard gets your workspace ready, and Home then guides you through the first few things to do. Source: https://infranest.io/docs/getting-started Last updated: 2026-10-26 --- New to InfraNest? This article walks you through setting up your workspace and getting InfraNest watching your infrastructure, whether you're signing up for the first time or joining a team that's already set up. ## Overview - Signing up walks you through a short setup wizard that finds out what you manage and gives you a head start on watching it. - **Home** then picks up where the wizard left off, showing your stack and what still needs attention. - Nothing is required beyond creating your account — you can skip ahead and come back later without losing anything. ## Set up your workspace 1. **Create your account** — enter your name, email, password and a name for your workspace. We fill the workspace name in from your email address, so most people leave it alone; you can rename it here or later. 2. **What do you manage?** — pick the areas you care about: **Domains**, **DNS**, **Servers**, **Monitoring**, **Drop Catch** and **Certificates**. Your choices decide what the next step offers and what you see first. 3. **A head start** (optional) — what you picked decides what's offered: - Websites, domains, DNS or certificates → a box called **Your website or domain**, already filled in with your company's domain when we know it, and a **Start watching** button. - Servers → **Bring in your servers**: connect your cloud account right there, or install our agent on any Linux server. - Drop catch → type the name you want, and you're taken straight to watching it. - Nothing picked → the same box, to start watching your website. If you already know what you want to connect, choose **Connect an account** to search the list of providers — the most used come first — and connect one without leaving the page. **Look around first** is always there and takes you straight to **Home**. 4. **Done** — if you connected something, you're taken straight to Setup, where we show what we found and offer to watch it for you. Otherwise you land on **Home**, which shows your stack and what InfraNest already watches. ### Start watching 1. Type your website or domain, or keep the one we filled in for you. 2. If we know a second domain of yours, it appears under the box, ticked — untick it to leave it out. 3. Choose **Start watching**. This one click does two things: it sets up checks for your website, its certificate and your mail settings (with email alerts turned on), and it shows how your domain is put together — where it's registered, where its DNS is hosted, who serves the website, who handles the mail, and who issued the certificate. The next screen tells you how many checks were set up and what each one answers — *Is your site online? Is the certificate valid? Does your email still arrive?* — along with how often we check. You'll find them under **Monitoring**. **Undo** right there takes them all back. If your plan doesn't have room for everything, website checks come first and we tell you what didn't fit. If you haven't confirmed your email address yet, checks start right away and alerts begin once you confirm. The same screen asks **Also send alerts to Slack or Teams?** so your whole team hears about an outage, not just your inbox. **Slack** connects in one click; **Teams** walks you through a few extra steps. Neither takes you out of setup, and your email alerts stay as they are. **Invite a teammate** sends an invitation and gets them alerts by email too; it appears once you've confirmed your email address. All three are optional — **Continue** carries on without them. We only name a provider when we're sure; anything we don't recognise says so. A provider we support shows its logo with **Connect** (connect it right there) and **Ask someone** (sends a link to whoever has the login). Connecting is optional — watching works without it. If your mail is missing a DMARC record, we don't ask you to fix it during signup. It shows up later on **Home** as a tip: **Show me how** gives you the exact record to add, with a **Copy** button, and **Later** puts it away. > [!TIP] > Managing domains for clients? Paste a list instead of one domain — we group them by the providers they use, so you can connect each provider once, and you can set one client per domain so **Home** can show what's open per client. If you look a domain up and stop there, we send one email the next day with what we found, so you can pick up where you left off. It's never a series, and you can switch it off under **My account → Notifications**. You can skip from any step after the first and come back later — nothing is lost. ![Getting started with InfraNest (1)](/media/758841b0-7812-4df2-b20f-1996b3100c60) ![Getting started with InfraNest (2)](/media/c51e45ca-2c83-4bec-b118-544584923f11) ![Getting started with InfraNest (3)](/media/86e74d08-3b32-4117-8996-ebe7e817ad40) > [!NOTE] > Areas that aren't in your plan still appear, marked with an **Upgrade** badge, so you can see what else is available. ## Continue from a free tool If you checked a domain with one of our free tools (SSL check, DNS propagation, email record checks or the domain health check) and signed up from there, we remember which domain it was and what you were checking. On **What do you manage?** (or on **Home**, if you were already signed in) you'll see two shortcuts: 1. **Start monitoring** keeps watching what you just checked: - After the SSL check — the certificate, so you hear well before it expires. - After DNS propagation — the record you looked up, so you hear if it stops pointing where it should. - After an email record check — your SPF, DMARC and MX records, so you hear if one disappears. - After the domain health check — your site over HTTPS with its certificate, plus those email records. A single monitor opens already filled in for you to review and save. Email records and the domain health check add their monitors (three or four) as soon as you click; you can change or remove them afterwards on the **Monitoring** page. 2. **Connect the registrar** opens the list of registrars, so your domain's renewals and expiry dates come in from where you registered it. Or choose **No thanks** and the shortcuts go away. ## Apply a discount code 1. On the first step, select **Have a discount code?**. 2. Type in your code — if you arrived from a link that already carried one, it's filled in for you. An unrecognised code never stops you creating your account — we check it once your account exists and tell you on the last step. Your code doesn't change anything until you subscribe: nothing is charged during your free trial, so the discount comes off your first invoice. It's waiting for you on the plans when you get there. ## About your password We'll tell you the requirements as you type, and there's a **Show** button if you want to check what you've entered. One rule surprises people: we check new passwords against public lists of passwords stolen in data breaches, and refuse any that appear there — even if it's long enough and has the right mix of characters. If that happens, pick something you haven't used anywhere else. Three or four unrelated words make a strong password that's easy to remember. ## Finish setting up from Home After the wizard, **Home** shows **Your stack**: the parts we found — website, certificate, mail, alerts, registrar, DNS and, if you have them, servers — and how many InfraNest already watches. Each part says where it stands: - **Watched** or **connected** — InfraNest sees it, for example "9 zones from Cloudflare". - **Not watched yet** — we found it in public records; **Watch it** sets up the checks in one click. - **Not connected** — we know which provider runs it. **Connect** opens that provider, and **Ask someone** sends a link to whoever has the login. - **Not known yet** — nothing to go on so far. What you told us you manage comes first. If you only manage servers, you won't see domain parts until you have a domain. **Alerts** shows where alerts go today; when they reach only your inbox, you can add **Slack** or **Teams**, or **Invite a teammate** who gets them by email too. When there's more we can set up for you, **Review** takes you to **Setup**, and what you apply there fills in the map. **Hide** takes the map off **Home**; the **Finish setup** reminder stays in the menu until you turn it off. There's also a short tour of the main menu: **Home** (with what setup created for you), **Integrations**, the parts of the menu you said you use or already have something in, **Alerts**, and the search box. It shows once; to see it again, choose **Take the tour** in your profile menu, or press ⌘K and type "tour". All of it is optional and dismissible. **Tips** appear on the page they're about — for example on **Drop Catch** or **DNS** — and disappear once you dismiss them or already use the feature. When nothing needs you, **Home** may show one of them. Product updates are inside the bell: open it and click the sparkle icon at the top. A dot on the sparkle means there's something new you haven't read — and when that's the only thing new, the bell shows a small dot without a number. ## Pages with nothing in them yet An empty page tells you what it can already do for you. **Domains** and **DNS** show where your domains and DNS actually are — for example "Your domains are at TransIP and Cloudflare" — with **Connect** and **Ask someone**, and count them in while an import runs. **Monitors**, **Certificates** and **Status Pages** first offer what we can set up from what you already have — the websites your domains serve, the servers you imported, a draft status page for what you monitor — and still let you add one yourself. ## Signing up with Google, Microsoft or GitHub Signing up with **Google**, **Microsoft** or **GitHub** skips the first step — your name and email come from that account — and continues straight to **What do you manage?** and the rest of setup. Your workspace is named from your email address, and you can rename it in **Settings**. If you choose one of those buttons on the sign-in page and you don't have an account yet, we don't create one straight away. You'll see "Welcome — let's create your account" with the address we'd use, and **Create my account** to carry on. Signing up with a personal address is fine. If you'll use InfraNest for work with colleagues, your work address keeps invites, alerts and your company's domain together, so the page offers **Continue with my work account instead**, which lets you pick a different account. ## Joining through an invite If you join through an invite, you go straight to your team's workspace and skip the setup wizard. Sign in with the address the invite was sent to. You'll still see the **What do you manage?** picker once, on your first sign-in, so InfraNest can tailor things for you. ## Next steps - Connect an integration to start syncing your infrastructure. - Check your free trial to see what's included and how long you have.