By default, whenever an outage is discovered, our system will run five confirmation checks from different locations to ensure that this outage is legitimate. You can lower the number of confirmation checks for any of your network services checks. You may want to do this if you would like to be alerted for localized network connection failures.

Accounting for AnyCast IP is a good reason to use this feature (read about it in our blog). If you are monitoring a service that uses an AnyCast IP, it is possible that the confirmation check can actually reach a different POP which is up, thus canceling a real outage. To prevent this, you can reduce the number of confirmation checks needed and whitelist the other nodes which you are certain will reach the same POP. This is a very effective way of monitoring AnyCast infrastructure.

Edit the network service check on which you would like to limit the number of confirmation checks and go to the Thresholds tab.

On this tab, you will see a Confirmation Checks Required dropdown. Select however many confirmation checks you would like, and then click Save to finalize your change. From now on, this network service check will only perform the number of confirmation checks you've specified.

Keep in mind that lowering the required number of confirmation checks may increase alerts. The reason we have multiple confirmation checks is to ensure we do not send false alerts.