Monitoring Lifecycle

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

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

The effective interval is the longer of the monitor’s configured interval and the plan minimum.

Plan	Minimum check interval
Free	5 min
Pro	3 min

Paused monitors are not checked.

Status	Meaning
up	Healthy. All check conditions are met
down	Failing. Unexpected status code, timeout, keyword condition violation, etc.
degraded	Indeterminate. The check infrastructure could not determine the result. The current HTTP / TCP / Ping monitors only return up / down, so this state does not occur
paused	Paused
unknown	Not yet checked or otherwise unknown

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

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.

• 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
• Manual resolution resets the consecutive-down counter. If the monitor remains down, a new incident is created and notifications are sent after 5 more consecutive failures

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