Q: How do I know my monitoring service itself didn't quietly die? A: Great instinct, because a silent monitor is worse than none, it gives false confidence. The pattern that catches this is a heartbea…
Q: Should I alert on slow response times, not just full outages? A: Yes, because most outages announce themselves as creeping slowness first. A response-time alert is your early warning before the sit…
Q: How do I stop my monitor from paging me during planned deploys? A: Use scheduled maintenance windows, but use them surgically. Mute only the specific checks affected, for a tight time box, and let …
Q: My site went down but the server was healthy. Could it be DNS? A: Very possibly, and most uptime setups never check it. If your domain stops resolving, a fat-fingered record, an expired domain, or …
Q: Can I just monitor my site from a script on the same server? A: You can, but it only catches application-level failures, never the ones users actually report. If the box loses power, the network dr…
Q: One of my monitors keeps going up and down every few minutes. What is that? A: That's flapping, and it usually means a real but intermittent problem, not a monitoring glitch. Common causes: one unh…
