A simple way of explaining how our Uptime Monitoring system works, is that it will consider any of your Uptime Monitors as being Offline if at least half+1 of the monitoring locations will fail to see your monitored target as being Online. So if you monitor a website from, say, 12 locations, that means at least 7 locations will need to declare your website as being down for the monitor to be considered Offline and issue alerts. This can be further tweaked from advanced settings under the `Number of Triggering Locations` section.
This method has proven to be quite effective in its accuracy, avoiding local false positives quite well and detecting real outages quite fast. This is because the core concept is very simple: it would be technically close to impossible for the majority of our monitored locations to have problems or issue false positives, all at the same time, in order to cause an Uptime Monitor to be marked as being down when it’s actually not.
However, for some important Uptime Monitors, you may still want to be aware even if a few of our locations start encountering issues accessing your monitored target. This could be a sign of partial network outages, possible overload on your server (so only part of the requests are served properly), malfunctioning load balancer, etc.
This is where this `Location Fails Warning` feature comes into play, allowing you to configure an Uptime Monitor to alert you if (X) number of location fails have been detected within the past (Y) minutes. As you may already know, our platform stores all of the location fails (errors encountered from each of our monitored locations towards the monitored target) in the Location Fail Log, for all of your Uptime Monitors; so we’re now using this data for the `Location Fails Warning` feature.
In order to get started proceed to the advanced settings of any of your Uptime Monitors:
And locate the `Location Fails Warning` section:
So, here we’re having the (X) and (Y) values, (X) being the number of detected location fails within the last (Y) minutes.
Even if one location fails multiple times within the same minute (due to `Number Of Tries` being higher than 1), it will still count as one location fail.
Take this Location Fail Log example for instance:
The above example counts as 5 Location Fails within that one minute, even though London, Tokyo, and Mumbai have each failed several times.
Still going by the above example, that particular incident would not trigger a downtime alert, because not enough locations have found the target to be Offline.
However, if you would have had the `Location Fails Warning` feature set to (X)=5 and (Y)=1, then you would have still gotten a warning letting you know there may be some issues with this Uptime Monitor, even though the monitor status remains as being Online. A warning that would look like this:
The smaller you set the (X) and (Y) values, the more sensitive to alerts your Uptime Monitor will become.
We advise that you carefully analyze your Location Fail Log before turning on this feature, to make sure you configure it properly, so you don’t get too many notifications, all the time.
Important Notes:
- When setting the (X) and (Y) values, keep in mind to divide (X) by (Y) to get the average fails per minute that you are aiming to get warnings for (i.e.: say you wish to be alerted if there’s an average of 3 fails per minute over a period of 10 minutes, then (X) would be 30 and (Y) would be 10; so 30 divided by 10 would equal 3 which was your goal).
- These warnings will not change the status of your Uptime Monitor to Offline, since there aren’t enough failed locations to change the monitor status.
- If at any point the number of failed locations will reach the tipping point, your monitor will be marked as being Offline and the regular downtime alerts are dispatched instead of these warnings.
- These warnings are only sent out while your Uptime Monitor is Online, because while being Offline it is to be expected for most/all of the locations to fail.
- These warnings will not be sent out if your Uptime Monitor has recently come back Online, within the past (Y) minutes, so as to avoid sending out warnings about location fails that had occurred while the monitor was Offline.
- These warnings will be sent to the Contact List attached to the Uptime Monitor, respecting the DND schedule, and Maintenance Mode without notifications. If no Contact List is assigned to this Uptime Monitor, then no warnings will be dispatched.
- These warnings will be sent out as often as your Uptime Monitor is being checked (i.e.: every 1 min, 3 min, 5 min, 10 min based on monitor’s Checkup Frequency).
- You should take under consideration the monitor’s Checkup Frequency when deciding the (X) and (Y) values (i.e.: if an Uptime Monitor is being checked every 5 minutes, then there’s going to be just one minute entry in the Location Fail Log, every 5 minutes, if locations are failing).