I monitor from one US location — is that enough for a global audience?

I monitor from one US location — is that enough for a global audience?

Q: My site serves users worldwide but I check from a single US East node. Am I missing problems?

A: A media site with heavy APAC traffic learned this the hard way. Their single US probe showed 99.97% uptime for a quarter. But their real-user data showed Singapore and Sydney visitors hitting 8–12 second load times during peak, sometimes timing out entirely — a CDN edge in the region was misconfigured and falling back to the US origin.

They added probes in Singapore, Sydney, and Frankfurt. The regional probes immediately exposed the issue, showing 14% failed checks from APAC versus 0.03% from the US node. Fixing the edge config cut APAC median load time from 9.1s to 1.4s.

The follow-up: put a probe where your users actually are, not just where your servers are. One reader keeps a simple rule — a monitoring region for every market that's more than 10% of traffic.

Got a question? Drop it in the comments.