How to Stop False Downtime Alerts

There's one thing worse than not monitoring your site: monitoring it so badly that you start ignoring the alerts. Alert fatigue is real, and it usually comes from false positives. Here's how to make every alert trustworthy.

Use a confirmation threshold

The single most effective fix. Instead of alerting on the first failed check, require two or three consecutive failures before opening an incident. A momentary hiccup resolves itself; a real outage keeps failing.

Set realistic timeouts

If your timeout is 3 seconds but your page sometimes takes 6 under load, you'll get phantom "down" alerts. Measure real response times and set the timeout with headroom.

Allowlist your monitor

The most common false positive: the site works in your browser but the monitor reports it down. That's almost always a firewall, WAF, rate limiter or bot protection blocking automated requests. Allowlist the monitoring service's IPs and User-Agent, and exempt them from rate limits and CAPTCHA challenges.

Match expected status codes

If your API legitimately returns a 401 or a custom code, tell the monitor that's healthy — otherwise every check looks like a failure.