How to Reduce False Positives in Your Alerts

A noisy on‑call is a fragile on‑call. Use these patterns to keep alerts meaningful.

Related: Uptime Monitoring Guide · Minimum Monitoring Interval

1) N‑of‑M with backoff

Require N of M failures (e.g., 2/3) and back off briefly (30–60s) before alerting humans.

2) Multi‑region agreement

Only escalate when 2+ regions agree on failure.

3) Warm‑ups after deploys

Suppress alerts briefly after deploys or autoscaling events.

4) Channel progression

• Start in Slack/Teams with context
• Escalate to SMS/PagerDuty if the outage persists

5) Separate “signal” and “root cause”

Ping/TCP tells you something is broken. HTTP/synthetic tells you what. See Ping vs HTTP Monitoring.