False positive (monitoring)
A false positive is an alert for an outage that isn't real — often a transient network blip from one location.
False positives erode trust in alerting: page people for non-incidents and they start ignoring alerts, which raises acknowledgement time. Multi-location quorum — requiring multiple regions or consecutive failures before declaring DOWN — keeps the false-positive rate low while still detecting real outages quickly.
Related
Start monitoring in under a minute
Free forever, no credit card. Upgrade when you need finer intervals.