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.
Related terms
IncidentAn incident is a recorded event representing a detected problem with a service, from the moment it is confirmed until it is resolved.Uptime MonitoringUptime monitoring is the practice of automatically checking a service at regular intervals to detect outages and measure availability.Escalation PolicyAn escalation policy defines who gets notified about an incident, in what order, and how an unacknowledged alert escalates to the next responder.
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