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
Fifteen-second intervals across ten nodes named by city with every IPv4 and IPv6 address published, a minimum of two locations enforced (the operator refuses single-location checks as false-positive prone), and a downtime called only after three down checks from at least two locations with the same two-location recovery logic and a documented guarantee that any outage longer than the interval × 1.5 is notified — this is the false-positive handling I want before a page reaches my phone. Keyword, TCP, ping, SSL expiry and revocation, domain expiry and push-based cron monitoring round out the coverage, and monitoring can be paused. We found no public information on multi-step API checks with assertions, browser or transaction checks, or private locations inside my own network, and DNS record checks appear only as a request under review. 1 4 5 6 10 11 12