A false positive is a monitoring alert that fires when nothing is actually wrong — a transient network blip, a momentary CPU spike, a single failed probe that recovered immediately. False positives are the primary cause of alert fatigue.
False positives in uptime monitoring are usually caused by single-region transient failures: the probe location hit a brief routing issue, the DNS cache momentarily missed, the TLS handshake timed out under load. None reflect a real customer-facing problem.
The industry-standard fix is confirm-and-retry logic: never alert on a single failure. Require N consecutive failures from M different regions, with a brief retry interval, before opening an incident.
Every false positive trains the on-call team to ignore alerts. A monitoring system with a 5% false-positive rate is unusable; one with under 0.5% is trustworthy. Fixing false positives is the single biggest improvement you can make to operational signal quality.
See it in the product: Smart alerting.