---
category: Guides
title: How-to Guides
description: "Practical guides for integrating openstatus with GitHub Actions, OTLP endpoints, Cloudflare, and more."
sidebar:
    label: Guides Overview
    order: 1
---

Our how-to guides solve specific problems with step-by-step instructions, walk you through advanced features and integrations, and show you how to customise and extend your openstatus setup.

## Monitoring and integration

- **[Monitor your MCP server](/docs/guides/how-to-monitor-mcp-server)** — set up monitoring for Model Context Protocol servers.
- **[Export metrics to an OTLP endpoint](/docs/guides/how-to-export-metrics-to-otlp-endpoint)** — send monitoring data to your observability platform.
- **[Run synthetic tests in GitHub Actions](/docs/guides/how-to-run-synthetic-test-github-action)** — automate testing in your CI/CD pipeline.

## Status pages and widgets

- **[Add an SVG status badge to a GitHub README](/docs/guides/how-to-add-svg-status-badge)** — display real-time status in your repository.
- **[Use the React status widget](/docs/guides/how-to-use-react-widget)** — embed live status updates in your React application.
- **[Embed a status page in an iframe](/docs/guides/how-to-embed-status-page-iframe)** — drop a chromeless status page into any site.
- **[Deploy a status page on Cloudflare Pages](/docs/guides/how-deploy-status-page-cf-pages)** — host your status page on Cloudflare's edge network.

## Infrastructure and deployment

- **[Create a private location](/docs/guides/how-to-create-private-location)** — run a monitoring probe on your own infrastructure.
- **[Deploy a private probe on Cloudflare Containers](/docs/guides/how-to-deploy-probes-cloudflare-containers)** — serverless deployment for private probes.
- **[Self-host openstatus](/docs/guides/self-hosting-openstatus)** — deploy openstatus on your own servers.
- **[Self-host the status page only](/docs/guides/self-host-status-page-only)** — deploy just the status page without monitoring.

## Related sections

- **[Tutorials](/docs/tutorial/getting-started)** — for step-by-step learning instead.
- **[Explanations](/docs/concept/getting-started)** — to understand the concepts behind these guides.
- **[Reference](/docs/reference/overview)** — for detailed technical specifications.