<b>Q: My monitor keeps flipping between up and down every few minutes. What's going on?</b>

<b>Q: My monitor keeps flipping between up and down every few minutes. What's going on?</b>

A: That's flapping, and it usually means a service is genuinely unstable, not that your monitor is broken. Something is half-working: a struggling server in a pool, a connection limit being hit and released, or memory pressure causing intermittent failures. The flapping is the symptom of a real problem worth investigating.

To stop the alert spam without hiding the issue, add hysteresis:
— Require, say, 3 consecutive successes before declaring "recovered," not just one
— Require 2-3 failures before declaring "down"

That gap between the up-threshold and down-threshold keeps a wobbling service from toggling your alerts dozens of times an hour.

But do dig into the root cause. A service flapping every 5 minutes will eventually flap its way into a real, full outage.

Got a question? Drop it in the comments.