Checks, locations & failure confirmation
How this is scored
What can be monitored and how reliably a failure is detected: HTTP(S) with status code and keyword checks, TCP and port, ping, DNS records, SSL certificate and domain expiry, cron jobs and heartbeats, multi-step API checks with assertions, browser or transaction checks of a login or checkout, the shortest check interval, the number and regions of probe locations, the re-check from a second location before an alert, timeouts and response time thresholds, and private locations inside the customer's own network.
0 — Runs no checks of its own; a status page or alerting tool that only receives signals from other monitors.
3 — HTTP checks of a URL at a fixed interval with an up or down result; keyword, SSL, cron and the probe locations are basic or not described.
5 — HTTP(S), keyword, TCP or port, ping and SSL expiry checks, cron or heartbeat monitoring, an interval of one minute or less, several named probe locations, a failure confirmed from a second location before alerting, and response times recorded per check.
8 — Multi-step API checks with assertions on headers and body, browser or transaction checks of a user flow, DNS and domain expiry checks, sub-minute intervals, probe locations listed by city with the confirmation logic documented, private locations or agents for internal services, and maintenance windows that pause checks.
10 — Coverage and accuracy a reliability team runs on: every check type above with code-based checks (for example Playwright or scripted tests) in version control, location-specific thresholds, false-positive handling and probe health published, and the detection method documented so a result can be reproduced.
The SaaS Platform Engineer
The documented monitor types cover HTTP uptime, case-insensitive keyword, ping, TCP/UDP port, DNS, domain expiry, SSL certificate and heartbeat checks, plus API monitors and hosted Playwright browser checks at a 30-second interval, with private network monitoring documented as well. Failure confirmation is stronger than a plain second location: every monitor is checked from at least 4 locations by default and an incident is only created after a check fails from at least 3 locations, with the monitoring IP addresses and User-Agent published for allow-listing. We found no public information on assertions inside multi-step API checks, probe locations named by city, or maintenance windows that pause checks. 2 4 6 13 14