<b>Q: How many monitoring locations do I really need?</b>

<b>Q: How many monitoring locations do I really need?</b>

A: Three to five well-chosen regions beats a dozen random ones. The goal isn't coverage for its own sake, it's quorum: enough vantage points to tell "my site is down" apart from "one network path is having a bad day."

Pick locations that match where your users actually are. If 80% of traffic is US and EU, monitoring from Singapore mostly adds noise from long-haul routing hiccups.

Then use those locations as a voting system. Require agreement from a majority before declaring an outage. One sad region out of four is almost always a routing problem between that node and you, not a real failure.

Follow-up you might have: yes, do include a region near each major user base, because that path is the one your customers feel.

Got a question? Drop it in the comments.