Monitoring
False Positive
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.
In depth
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.
Why it matters
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.
How Lemwatch helps with false positive
Lemwatch monitors false positive continuously and alerts you the moment something changes.
Smart alerting →Related terms
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Browse the full Lemwatch monitoring glossary (47 terms).