After you set up tasks with alerts and they begin running, you may find yourself receiving multiple alerts, yet when you check the service or website, everything looks fine. It is important to pay attention to the contents of the alerts in order to figure out what is causing the error. Some errors may contain custom Dotcom-Monitor error codes, while others may contain http status codes that can help you decipher the cause of the error.
Due to the detailed nature of the Dotcom-Monitor monitoring capabilities, you may want to tweak your alerts, reports, or your recorded scripts to exclude certain elements or errors to eliminate false positives. Some of those reasons include:
- One or more monitoring locations are timing out while the rest of the locations are succeeding.
- Changes have been made to your site and certain elements that were expected are no longer found.
- Something on your website is responding slowly, causing the system to think it no longer exists,
- Network traffic is causing your site to slow down and exceed timeout limits.
- A “hiccup” in network traffic across the internet or from one monitoring location
- Third party elements are loading slowly and timing out.
- URLs to third party elements have been changed.
You can adjust for these false positives by creating Filters and applying the filter to the alerts and reports of the offending device.
You can also enable the False Positive Check on your devices. This will trigger a cascade of checks from a location that discovers a monitoring failure in order to confirm that the device is erroring more than once