False Positive (Alerting)

A false positive is an alert that reports a problem which is not actually affecting users: a false alarm.

False positives are the enemy of trustworthy monitoring. A single flaky network path, a slow DNS lookup, or bot protection challenging a check can look like an outage. If alerts cry wolf, teams start ignoring them, and miss the real one.

Good monitoring suppresses false positives by confirming failures from multiple locations and over multiple checks before opening an incident, trading a few seconds of delay for far higher signal quality.