Best practice for service check alerts

Service checks provide a way to get an insight into how your websites/URLs are responding to various locations. Checks are performed every 5 minutes.

Reducing False-Positives

The flexibility of our service monitoring allows you to fine-tune the alert configuration. If you're seeing many false-positives (alerts being sent about your check being down when it appears to be up) you should consider:

• Adding additional check locations - we recommend at least 6
• Increasing the alert threshold. If your website is down from 1 location and your alert is configured to trigger if it's down from a single location, you may find this to be too sensitive. Up it to 4 or 5 locations - this will be more indicative of how the URL is responding for global visitors utilising different networks.

Suggested Alert Configuration

We also recommend the following two alerts for true "site down" monitoring:

1. HTTP Code != 200 from at least 4 locations
2. HTTP Status == down from at least 4 locations

These alerts working together will give you a better insight into the true status of the configured check.

See our check methodology to understand how we perform checks.