Monitoring Lifecycle

The exact specification of how checks run, when they become incidents, and when incidents resolve.

Check Intervals

Checks run on a 1-minute cycle against monitors that are due. The effective interval is determined as follows:

• SSL certificate and domain monitors: fixed at once every 24 hours, regardless of settings
• All other types: the longer of the monitor’s configured interval and the plan minimum

Plan	Minimum check interval
Free	5 min
Pro	3 min
Business	1 min

Paused monitors are not checked.

Monitor Statuses

Status	Meaning
up	Healthy. All check conditions are met
down	Failing. Unexpected status code, timeout, keyword condition violation, missed heartbeat, etc.
degraded	Indeterminate. The check infrastructure could not determine the result
paused	Paused
unknown	Not yet checked or otherwise unknown

Note

HTTP monitors do not follow redirects. If a redirect is returned instead of the expected status code, the check is judged down.

Automatic Incident Creation

A single failed check never triggers a notification, to avoid false alarms.

1. Each down check increments a consecutive-down counter
2. After 5 consecutive down checks, an incident (ongoing) is created automatically
3. An incident-created notification (severity: critical) is sent at the same time
4. While an unresolved incident exists, no duplicate incident is created

Grace period for new monitors

A newly created monitor holds off incident detection until its first up check (to avoid false alarms from misconfiguration). However, if the monitor goes down 5 times in a row without ever being up, the grace period is cut short and an incident is created.

Degraded Status and Warning Incidents

If the check infrastructure for SSL certificate and domain monitors cannot be reached, the monitor becomes degraded instead of down (an infrastructure-side problem should not be reported as a target-side outage).

• When a monitor becomes degraded, a warning incident is created immediately (the 5-check rule does not apply). The notification severity is warning
• If the monitor transitions from degraded to down, the warning incident is resolved and normal incident detection takes over

Recovery and Automatic Resolution

• When a check returns to up, the consecutive-down counter resets and any unresolved incidents (ongoing or acknowledged) are automatically resolved
• A recovery notification is sent at the same time
• “Acknowledged” indicates that someone is handling the incident; acknowledged incidents are also auto-resolved on recovery

Maintenance Windows

Maintenance windows can be set per monitor or per service.

• During the window, incident detection is fully suspended and the consecutive-down counter is reset
• With auto-resolve enabled the window ends at its end time; otherwise it continues until manually ended