1-minute vs. 5-minute check intervals — is faster always better?

1-minute vs. 5-minute check intervals — is faster always better?

Q: Should I crank every monitor to 1-minute checks?

A: Not blindly. Faster intervals detect outages sooner but multiply false positives and cost, and they pound your origin with monitoring traffic. The right interval depends on what the page costs you when it's down.

A quick rule: checkout, login, and payment flows → 1 minute. Marketing pages and blogs → 5 minutes is plenty. Internal tools nobody touches at night → 5–15 minutes.

The trick people miss is decoupling check interval from alert sensitivity. Run 1-minute checks but require 2–3 consecutive failures before alerting. You get fast detection without paging someone over a single blip. That's almost always better than slowing the interval down to dodge noise — you keep the speed and lose the false alarms.

Got a question? Drop it in the comments.