Alerts & states
CuliPulse is deliberately quiet — it double-checks before telling you something is wrong, so a single slow response or a one-off network blip doesn’t wake you for nothing.
The four states
Section titled “The four states”- Up — the check is passing.
- Down — the check is failing (unreachable, wrong status, a failed assertion, a missed heartbeat).
- Degraded — working, but not well. A monitor goes degraded when it responds slower than your response-time threshold, when ping loss or latency crosses a limit you set, when a TLS certificate is close to expiring, or when a heartbeat job runs longer than its max duration.
- Unknown — CuliPulse temporarily can’t tell. If every checkpoint watching a monitor is unreachable (for example your only agent is offline) for three checks in a row, the monitor is marked unknown rather than down — because the target might be fine and the problem is on the watching side. The monitor’s “last checked” time freezes so you can see it’s stale.
These are the four health states. A monitor can also be paused (you stopped it) or pending (newly created, before its first result). Until that first result, a monitor shows no uptime figure and its 90-day bar stays empty. No results yet doesn’t count as 100% up.
Avoiding false alarms
Section titled “Avoiding false alarms”Wait for repeated failures
Section titled “Wait for repeated failures”A monitor is only marked down after a number of consecutive failed checks — you set this as “Alert me after” (1 to 5 failures). Likewise, a down monitor only flips back to up after a number of consecutive successful checks (“Mark healthy again after”, 1 to 5). A recovery from degraded back to up is immediate.
Degraded is flap-protected the same way — it takes repeated breaches, not one slow response, to go degraded.
More than one checkpoint
Section titled “More than one checkpoint”When you watch a target from several checkpoints, CuliPulse only declares it down once enough of them agree — this avoids alarms caused by a routing problem near a single location rather than a real outage. In the app this is the “Only alert if more than one location fails” option. Checkpoints that are themselves unreachable simply abstain — they never count toward a “down”. Vendor status, domain and DNS monitors are checked once by CuliPulse itself rather than from checkpoints, so this option doesn’t apply to them.
What’s in an alert
Section titled “What’s in an alert”Every alert is written in plain language and includes:
- the state (down, degraded, recovered, unknown) and a short symptom — the actual cause, like “Connection timed out” or “Returned 503”, not just “failed”;
- which checkpoints saw it down and which saw it up;
- how long it’s been going (and, on recovery, the total outage duration);
- a link straight to the monitor (or the specific incident) in the console.
The same information is delivered to every destination you’ve connected — see Notifications. For the exact machine-readable shape, see the webhook payload.
Incidents
Section titled “Incidents”When a monitor goes down or degraded, CuliPulse opens an incident and closes it on recovery. Each monitor’s detail page lists its past incidents with their duration, and the Overview page shows all open incidents across everything you watch. Uptime in Reports is calculated from these incidents.