Every website monitor promises to tell you when your site is down. The hard part is not telling you when it is not. A monitor that wakes you at 3 a.m. for a two-second network hiccup gets muted within a week – and then it is useless when the real outage comes.
Why single checks lie
The internet between a monitoring node and your server is not your server. DNS resolvers time out, a transit provider drops packets for a few seconds, a load balancer rotates a backend. From one vantage point, for one request, all of these look exactly like "down". Alerting on that is alerting on noise.
Retry, then confirm somewhere else
A trustworthy monitor does three things before it calls anything an outage:
- Retries from the same place, a few seconds apart, to rule out a momentary blip.
- Confirms from a different place – ideally another country and another network – to rule out a problem on the path rather than at the destination.
- Only then opens an incident and alerts, with the evidence attached: which locations, what error, since when.
In Ravnsight this is the only path to an alert. A failed check makes the monitor suspected down – visible in the app, silent otherwise. The same node retries after 10 and 20 seconds; a node in another country confirms. If the second node gets a healthy response, we record a local failure and move on.
Slow is not down
A site answering in eight seconds is a problem, but it is a different problem. We mark it degraded, show it everywhere and never page for it. On paid plans we also compare against the site's own rolling p95, because "slow" means something different for a static brochure and a busy shop.
Recovery and flapping
Two healthy checks in a row close the incident and send one recovery message with the duration. If the site goes down again within 30 minutes, the same incident reopens instead of producing a fresh round of alerts. You see "went down again (3×)" – one story, not three.
What this costs you
Confirmation adds between 30 and 60 seconds to the time from first failure to alert. For the price of a minute you get alerts you can trust – and a team that does not mute them.
