The internet is noisy. Packets drop, DNS resolvers hiccup and a server can pause for garbage collection. If every one of those blips pages someone at 3 a.m., people learn to ignore alerts - and then they miss the real one.
Consecutive-failure thresholds
The single most effective control is simple: only open an incident after N consecutive failures. Upmonora defaults to two. With a one-minute interval that means a genuine outage is confirmed within about two minutes, while a single transient error is recorded but never alerted.
Choosing the right threshold
- Critical checkout or API: threshold 2 with a 30–60 second interval.
- Marketing site or blog: threshold 2–3 with a 5-minute interval.
- Known flaky upstream: threshold 3–4, and investigate the flakiness separately.
Recovery should be instant
Thresholds apply to going down, not coming back. One successful check resolves the incident and sends a recovery alert, so your downtime numbers stay accurate.
Use maintenance windows
Planned deploys are not outages. Schedule a maintenance window and Upmonora keeps checking, but opens no incidents and sends no downtime alerts while it is active.
Separate "we failed" from "you failed"
A monitoring worker crashing is not your website going down. Upmonora retries its own failures with back-off and never marks a site as down because of an internal error - a distinction many teams only discover after a false 3 a.m. page.