StatusCake

SureAlert – Removing False Alerts

website down

By the very nature of testing thousands of websites every second sometimes sites can be marked down when they are in fact up. There is a wide range of reasons for this – some our side and some on the side of the website being tested.

At StatusCake.com we understand that false alarms can diminish how you react to alerts – is it really down this time? – the boy who cried wolf if you will. We’ve recently been looking into the issue of false alerts which can happen (not just on StatusCake but any website monitoring service) and have come up with a solution that eliminates the problem.

From today we’re happy to be using what we’re calling StatusCake ‘SureAlert’. The system is not only asks one server if your site is down, but a range of servers in the same country will also be asked to check on whether the initial initial diagnosis of downtime is correct. If all our website monitoring servers agree that it is indeed an instance of downtime then we’ll send out the notification alert.  If our other servers don’t agree – our “confirmation servers”  then we ask the original server which classed your site as down to test again and be sure it is actually down and wasn’t the result of a momentary blip in performance on either server.

With SureAlert we intend to really add the full force of concern that a downtime alert from StatusCake should bring – You will know that when you get have website downtime and need to act on it.  And it’s not a false alarm.  SureAlert is now live on all services and we welcome feedback on this new feature.

Share this

More from StatusCake

Engineering

Beyond Uptime: Building a Self-Healing OpenClaw Observability Stack

3 min read The allure of OpenClaw is undeniable. You deploy a highly autonomous, self-hosted AI agent, give it access to your repositories and inboxes, and watch it reason through complex workflows while you sleep. It is the dream of the ultimate 10x developer tool realized. But as any veteran DevOps engineer will tell you: running an LLM-backed

When AWS us-east-1 Fails, Much of the Internet Fails With It

7 min read There are cloud outages, and then there are us-east-1 outages. That distinction matters because failures in AWS’s Northern Virginia region rarely feel like ordinary regional incidents. They tend instead to expose something larger and more uncomfortable: too much of the modern internet still behaves as though one place is an acceptable concentration point for infrastructure,

In the Age of AI, Operational Memory Matters Most During Incidents

7 min read Artificial intelligence is making software easier to produce. That much is already obvious. Code that once took hours to scaffold can now be drafted in minutes. Boilerplate, integration logic, tests, refactors and small internal tools can be generated with startling speed. In some cases, even substantial pieces of implementation can be assembled quickly enough to

AI Didn’t Kill the SDLC. It Made It Harder to See

10 min read Whilst AI has compressed the visible stages of software delivery; requirements, validation, review and release discipline have not disappeared. They have been pushed into automation, runtime and governance. The real risk is not that the lifecycle is dead, but that organisations start acting as if accountability died with it. There is a now-familiar story about

When Code Becomes Cheap: The New Reliability Constraint in Software Engineering

4 min read How AI Is Shifting Software Engineering’s Primary Constraint For most of the history of software engineering, the primary constraint was production. Code was expensive, skilled engineers were scarce, and shipping features required concentrated human effort. Velocity was limited by how fast people could reason, implement, test, and deploy. That constraint shaped everything from team size,

Buy vs Build in the Age of AI (Part 3)

5 min read Autonomous Code, Trust Boundaries, and Why Governance Now Matters More Than Ever In Part 1, we looked at how AI has reduced the cost of building monitoring tools. Then in Part 2, we explored the operational and economic burden of owning them. Now we need to talk about something deeper. Because the real shift isn’t

Want to know how much website downtime costs, and the impact it can have on your business?

Find out everything you need to know in our new uptime monitoring whitepaper 2021

*By providing your email address, you agree to our privacy policy and to receive marketing communications from StatusCake.