Avoiding false alarms

A monitoring tool is only useful if people trust its alerts. StatusTick has five controls that decide whether a failed check becomes an incident. The defaults are safe; change them per monitor when you need to.

1. Confirmation from more than one region

Every check runs from all the regions you chose, at the same time. A network problem between one region and your site should not wake anyone up, so:

• By default, a monitor is down only when at least 2 regions fail.
• When one region fails but not enough to confirm, StatusTick re-checks that region at once.
• You can set the number of failing regions from 1 up to the number of regions on the monitor.

The check result keeps each region's result, so you can see, for example, "down from EU West only".

2. Failed checks in a row

Short blips during a deploy can fail one check. In the incident settings you choose:

• Failures to open: how many failed checks in a row open an incident (1 to 10, default 2).
• Successes to resolve: how many good checks in a row resolve it.

The incident start time is the time of the first failed check, so your downtime numbers stay honest.

3. Slow is not down

Set a slow-response threshold on a monitor. A check that answers correctly but slower than the threshold is Degraded, not down. Degraded shows on dashboards and status pages as "Degraded performance".

4. Blocked is not down

Firewalls, WAFs and bot protection (for example a Cloudflare challenge) sometimes block monitoring requests while real users are fine. When StatusTick sees a typical block response, the check is Blocked, not down:

• You get one notice with steps to allow StatusTick, at most once a day.
• Blocked does not open an incident unless you turn that on for the monitor.
• A real 403 from your application still counts as down when 403 is not an expected status code.

See Allowlisting StatusTick.

5. Maintenance windows

During a maintenance window, failures do not open incidents or send alerts. Windows can be one-off or repeat daily, weekly on chosen days, or monthly, with a start time, a length and a time zone.

Delays and escalation

• Notification delay: wait a few minutes after an incident opens before alerting, in case it resolves on its own.
• Auto-resolve delay: wait before resolving, so a flapping monitor does not open and close incidents again and again.
• Escalation: if nobody acknowledges an incident within the delay you set, StatusTick alerts a second set of channels, up to 3 times. Acknowledging or resolving the incident stops it.