Statuses and alert timing
What up, down, and degraded mean, and why an alert fires only after several failed checks in a row instead of the first one.
Two things surprise people most: what degraded means, and why a brief outage didn't page anyone. Both come down to how Telescope classifies a check and when it decides to alert.
What the statuses mean
Every monitor is always in one of three states:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Up | The check passed — your service is healthy. |
| Degraded | The service is reachable but the check couldn't complete cleanly — most often a firewall (WAF) blocking the checker, or an SSL/domain that's valid but nearing expiry. Worth a look, not an outage. |
| Down | The check failed — an error status, a timeout, an unreachable host, or a failed assertion. |
If a monitor is degraded because of a firewall, see Monitor down but site up. For SSL and domain degraded states, see SSL and domain monitors.
Why my site was down but I got no alert
Why it happens. Telescope doesn't alert on the first failed check. Each monitor has a failure threshold — the number of consecutive failed checks required before it's considered down and an alert is created. This is deliberate: it filters out single transient blips so one flaky check doesn't wake you at 3am.
The default threshold is 3 consecutive failures. So a service that fails once or twice and recovers never crosses the line — and never alerts.
| Check | Result | Consecutive failures | Alert? |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Down | 1 | No — below threshold |
| 2 | Down | 2 | No — below threshold |
| 3 | Down | 3 | Yes — alert created |
| 4 | Down | 4 | No — already alerted |
| 5 | Up | 0 (reset) | Recovery alert |
How to fix. Tune the threshold to the service:
- For a critical, must-know-instantly service, drop it to 1 so the first failure alerts.
- For a flaky endpoint you don't want to hear about on every hiccup, raise it.
Detection time follows your interval
The threshold is counted in checks, not minutes. With a 3-failure threshold and a 60-second interval, a real outage takes about three checks — a few minutes — to confirm before it alerts. A shorter interval confirms faster.
One alert per outage
Once an alert fires for a monitor, Telescope won't create another for the same ongoing issue — a site down for an hour is one alert, not one per check. When the monitor recovers, its active alerts are resolved automatically, a recovery notification is sent, and the failure counter resets to zero. A new alert is only created if it goes down again afterward.
See Alerts for the full lifecycle and Notification channels for where alerts are delivered.
Monitor down, but my site is up
Why a healthy site can show as down or degraded — a firewall blocking the checker, a timeout that's too low, redirects, or a keyword mismatch — and how to fix each.
SSL and domain monitors
Why an SSL monitor goes degraded before it goes down, what a hostname mismatch means, and why a domain check can't always read an expiry date.