Short intervals catch issues faster but can add noise and cost. Here’s a pragmatic way to choose.
Related: Uptime Monitoring Guide · Reduce False Positives
A simple rule of thumb
- 60–120s: critical revenue paths (checkout, API gateway)
- 300s: standard website endpoints
- 600s+: low‑criticality endpoints
Make intervals meaningful
Pair short intervals with strong filtering (N‑of‑M, multi‑region). Use longer intervals for flakier third‑parties to avoid noise.
Revisit quarterly
If MTTR is high or outages are missed, shorten intervals and improve filtering.
Put this into practice
Start monitoring in minutes. Email, Slack, Teams, Discord, PagerDuty, and SMS alerts.