Regions and probes

Regions and probes explain how InfraNest checks your service from multiple places around the world, so you can trust your alerts and understand exactly what your visitors are experiencing. This article is for anyone setting up or reviewing checks on the Monitors page.

Overview

• InfraNest runs each check from every region you pick, on its own schedule, instead of from just one place.
• Checking from several locations avoids false alarms caused by a problem in a single network and lets you see how your service looks from different parts of the world.
• A failure from any one region still matters — if something blocks visitors in one part of the world, that's a real outage for them, even if everywhere else is fine.

How regions and consensus work

1. Hover a block in the latest checks strip to see which region ran that check and when.
2. Open the chart on a check's detail page and choose Compare regions to see response times side by side for each region.
3. If a check fails, check the alert email — it lists which regions saw the site down and which still saw it up.
4. Look at Failed checks before alerting to see how many checks in a row must fail before an alert fires (2 by default). This is what stops a single blip from paging you.
5. Remember that slow responses show as degraded, not down.
6. If a check says your site is down but it loads fine for you, see the article A monitor says my site is down, but it loads for me.

NoteIf a location can't reach your site at all on the first try, it tries once more right away. Only two failures in a row from that location count as down. A slow or error response is never retried — it's final.

You can also pin preferred regions and choose IPv4 or IPv6 per check. The default, prefer IPv4, connects over IPv4 whenever your site has an IPv4 address, and only uses IPv6 for a site that has none.

Set the alert condition: any region or all regions

The Alert condition on a check decides how many of its regions must see a problem before you get alerted.

1. Open the check and find the Alert condition setting.
2. Choose Alert when any region reports down if every region matters to you — for example, because you have customers in each of them. This is the default, and one region failing is enough to alert you.
3. Choose Alert when all selected regions simultaneously report down if you want to be alerted only when every region you picked agrees your site is down at the same time. Pick this if one region is known to be unreliable and you don't want it paging you on its own.
4. Keep in mind that Failed checks before alerting still applies either way — the condition needs to hold for that many checks in a row before an alert goes out.
5. Know that the alert ends as soon as one region reports your site reachable again — with all, that's the moment "every region is down" stops being true.

TipIf a region's probe goes offline for a while, it can't vote either way, so the regions still reporting decide. This means an offline probe never silently turns your alerts off. With only one region selected, both alert conditions behave the same.

Read the uptime bars

• Green means no confirmed downtime in that period. A single location failing now and then, without other locations agreeing, doesn't count as an outage. Hover the bar to see how many checks failed without being confirmed.
• Amber means part of the period was confirmed down, or at least half of all checks failed.
• Red means the whole period was down.

Understand the uptime percentage

The percentage shown beside a monitor — on the Monitoring page, on its own page, and on your status page — is the share of time it was not confirmed down.

• It follows the same rule as the bars: a single failed check from one location, without the others agreeing, doesn't lower it.
• Only an outage that opened an incident lowers it, for as long as that incident lasted.
• Planned maintenance never counts against it.
• On a status page, time in a minor incident counts at 30%, following the usual convention for public status pages. The app and the monthly report, however, count every minute in full.

If you filter a monitor's page to a single region, the percentage shown is what that region alone saw — every failed check from there counts, whether confirmed or not. Use that filtered view to investigate where a problem was seen, but quote the unfiltered figure as the official one.

The latest checks strip at the top of a check's overview shows results across all locations — hover a block to see when it ran and from which region.

Compare regions on the chart

1. Open a check's detail page.
2. Above the chart, open the dropdown and choose Compare regions.
3. Review the overlaid response-time lines — one per region.

Each line is drawn only where that region actually reported, so a break in a line means "no measurement from here," not "no data at all." A line can break for two normal reasons:

• The probe there was offline or restarting. InfraNest borrows a probe from another region to keep checking your service in the meantime, so you still get alerts — but the measurement is credited to the region that made it, and the region it stood in for shows a gap. Hover the gap, or read the note under the chart (for example, "APAC had no probe of its own for part of this period. It was checked from EU instead").
• The check hadn't started running from that region yet — a recently added region only has history from the moment it started.

NoteThe 24 hours view plots every individual check, while 7 days and 30 days average results into 4-hour and daily points — so a brief spike looks smaller there than it does over 24 hours.