StatusDrift monitors your services from multiple geographic locations around the world. This distributed monitoring approach helps distinguish between actual outages and localized network issues, reducing false positive alerts.
How Multi-Location Monitoring Works
When you create a monitor, StatusDrift performs health checks from several monitoring locations simultaneously. Each location independently checks your service and reports its results. This geographic distribution provides a more accurate picture of your service’s global availability.
Location Confirmation for Alerts
Rather than triggering an alert when a single monitoring location detects a failure, StatusDrift can require confirmation from multiple locations before sending notifications. This confirmation requirement significantly reduces false positives caused by:
- Regional network outages affecting only certain paths to your service
- DNS propagation delays in specific regions
- Temporary routing issues between the monitoring location and your server
- CDN edge node failures that only affect certain geographic areas
Configuring Location Requirements
In your monitor’s alert settings, you can specify how many locations must confirm a failure before an alert is triggered. The available options include:
- Any location – Alert immediately when any single location detects a failure. Use this for services where even regional unavailability is critical.
- Two locations – Require at least two monitoring locations to confirm the failure. This is a good balance between responsiveness and false positive reduction.
- Three or more locations – Provides strong protection against regional false positives.
Combining with Consecutive Check Requirements
Multi-location confirmation works together with consecutive check requirements. For example, you might configure a monitor to require:
- 2 consecutive failed checks
- Confirmed by at least 2 locations
With this configuration, each location must independently detect 2 consecutive failures, and at least 2 locations must agree before an alert is sent. This combination provides robust protection against transient issues while still alerting promptly for genuine outages.
Viewing Location-Specific Results
The monitor detail page shows check results broken down by location. This visibility helps you identify patterns such as:
- Services that perform well globally but have issues in specific regions
- Latency variations between different geographic areas
- Regional CDN or DNS configuration problems
Best Practices
- Start with two-location confirmation – This setting works well for most services, balancing accuracy with alert speed
- Consider your audience – If your service primarily serves users in one region, you may want alerts from that region’s monitoring location
- Review location data regularly – Check if certain regions consistently show different results, which might indicate CDN or routing issues worth addressing
- Adjust based on service type – Critical services may warrant single-location alerting, while less critical services can use stricter confirmation requirements