What counts as down, and how to avoid false alarms

A check fails when the site does not answer before the Timeout, or answers with an error. A failed check then opens an incident, depending on your settings.

Three settings under Advanced settings decide how quickly you hear:

• Confirmation period: how long to wait after a failed check before opening an incident. It starts at Immediate. Raise it to ignore short blips.
• Recovery period: how long the monitor must stay up before an incident resolves. It starts at 1 minute.
• Timeout: how long each check waits for an answer. It starts at 30 seconds.

Turning on more Regions also reduces false alarms, because you can see whether one region or all of them had trouble.

If a monitor says down and your site looks fine, read why a monitor says down when my site is up.