Q: My site is up but I keep getting 'down' alerts. How do I stop the false positives?

Q: My site is up but I keep getting 'down' alerts. How do I stop the false positives?

A: Work this checklist top to bottom, it's almost always one of these.

— Require 2-3 failed checks from 2+ locations before alerting. A single probe glitch shouldn't page you.
— Raise the request timeout from the default (often 5s) to 15-30s. Slow isn't down.
— Whitelist your monitor's IP ranges in your firewall, WAF and rate limiter. You're probably blocking the prober.
— Set a realistic User-Agent and confirm Cloudflare/bot protection isn't challenging it.
— Check the monitor follows redirects if you force HTTPS or www.

The usual follow-up: if it only fires at the same minute each hour, that's your cron or backup job choking the server, not the monitor. Fix the load, not the alert.

Got a question? Drop it in the comments.