A common question from Rigor users configuring new checks is “What alerting threshold should I use?”
For Real Browser Checks and Uptime Checks, Rigor provides the option to notify ‘Never,’ ‘Immediately,’ or after a set number of consecutive failures.
For most Rigor users, we recommend not using the ‘Immediately’ setting. It can be tempting to set alerts to notify ‘Immediately’ because, after all, we want to know as quickly as possible if some type of performance problem is occurring.
But because connectivity is prone to temporary intermittent blips, setting an alert to ‘Immediately’ can produce one-off alerts at unexpected times. We find that most users who rely on the ‘Immediately’ setting will start tuning out alerts as ‘noise’ and ultimately end up missing significant performance problems when they do occur.
For most Rigor users, alerting after ‘2 Consecutive Errors’ provides the best indication that an alert correlates to a real actionable problem - whether a site has changed or some degradation is occurring.
Notify ‘Immediately’ can be a great option if your team is passing alerts from Rigor into a third-party system that handles escalations and reporting.