Sometimes Freshping may send out a downtime alert but when you check, your site is up and running. You might think that Freshping has recorded a false positive. 

However, not all alerts of this nature are false alerts. They could be due to micro downtimes. It's possible that your site might have been down for few seconds, and between the time you receive an alert and verify it, your site might have come back up.

What Freshping does to prevent false alarms, false alerts, and false positives

Additional confirmation when your site is down or responding slowly: 

Freshping pings your site for every minute. Once pinged, Freshping waits for the site's response. If the site is slow i.e takes more time than industry standards (>10 seconds) to load, Freshping then pings your site from a second (backup) test location. We do this additional test to check if there's a network issue between your website and the location of the first ping. Only when the second location also confirms downtime will we send you a down alert.

Exact error message when your site reports errors: 
We log the error reported by your site as an SSL error, a 5xx error, or a 4xx error.  When you see one of these error messages, you can say with certainty that it's an actual downtime. 

Configurable alert sensitivity
You can also set the alert sensitivity to 'low' by going to Settings>Acccount Settings and looking under the 'Alert sensitivity for email alerts' section. Setting the sensitivity to low alerts you only if your website is down for two consecutive polling intervals.

If you still think your alert is a false one, email us at [email protected] with your false-alert email copy & we will look into our logs & tell you what exactly happened. We take false alerts seriously, and your efforts go a long way in improving Freshping

Learn more about Freshping's alerting mechanism here