Q: Everyone says 1-minute checks are the gold standard. Should I always use them?

Q: Everyone says 1-minute checks are the gold standard. Should I always use them?

A: No, that advice is half right. The shorter the interval, the faster you detect outages, but you also amplify false positives. A single dropped packet on a 60-second cadence flags downtime; on a 5-minute cadence that same blip self-heals before the next check.

The real lever is not interval alone, it is confirmation logic. Use a tight interval (30-60s) only when paired with multi-location confirmation and a 2-failure threshold before alerting. Without that, 1-minute checks just generate noise.

Recommendation: reserve sub-minute checks for revenue-critical endpoints, keep informational pages at 3-5 minutes.

Follow-up you might ask: does this raise my bill? Yes, slightly, which is another reason to tier it.

Got a question? Drop it in the comments.