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Website and API monitoring glossary
Short definitions of the terms we use in Monitoreo TECDEX and in any conversation about availability. Answer first, detail after.
- Uptime
- The time a site or service is available and responding correctly. It's expressed as a percentage of a period: 99.9% uptime in a month allows about 43 minutes of downtime.
- Downtime
- The time a service is unavailable. It's the opposite of uptime and what lowers availability.
- Availability
- The percentage of time a service worked during a period: time up divided by time measured. Monitoreo TECDEX excludes scheduled maintenance and measurement gaps.
- SLA (service level agreement)
- A provider's commitment about service quality, usually a minimum availability percentage (for example 99.9% a month) and what happens if it's missed.
- SLO
- An internal service level objective: the target a team sets to meet its promised SLA with margin.
- SLA report
- A document showing each service's real availability over a period, with outages, their duration and cause. It's how you check whether a provider kept its promise.
- Uptime monitoring
- Checking a site or service at fixed intervals (every minute, for example) from outside your network and alerting when it stops responding.
- Synthetic monitoring
- Simulating what a user or system would do (open a page, log in, call an API) to verify the whole path works, even when no real users are around.
- API monitoring
- Calling an API periodically and validating that it responds, how fast, and with the expected content, not just a 200 code.
- Status page
- A public page showing whether your services work now and their recent history, so customers don't have to ask.
- Incident
- A period when a service is failing. In Monitoreo TECDEX it opens after 2 consecutive failed checks and closes once the service stays up for 10 minutes.
- False positive
- A downtime alert when the service was actually working, e.g. because of a network blip. Requiring several consecutive failures before alerting reduces them.
- Latency (response time)
- How long a service takes to respond. Above a threshold it's logged as slowness: a warning, not downtime.
- MTTR (mean time to recovery)
- The average time a service takes to come back after an outage. Lower is better.
- Scheduled maintenance
- A work window announced in advance. It doesn't count as downtime in the availability calculation.
- Measurement gap
- A period when the monitoring platform couldn't measure. Monitoreo TECDEX excludes it from the calculation: it counts as neither up nor down.
- Monitoring location
- Where the checks run from. Checking from outside your network shows what a customer sees.
- SSL/TLS certificate
- A file that enables encrypted connections (https) and proves the site is who it claims to be. If it expires, browsers show a warning and many integrations stop working.
- Certificate expiry monitoring
- Checking how many days a site's certificate has left and alerting before it expires.
- Keyword check
- Verifying that a page contains (or doesn't contain) a given text. It catches sites that respond but show an error.
- Ping
- A basic network test that confirms a machine responds. It doesn't tell you whether the application works.
- TCP port check
- Verifying that a service accepts connections on a port (mail, database, VPN).
- Heartbeat
- A signal a scheduled job sends when it finishes correctly. If it doesn't arrive on time, you get an alert. In Monitoreo TECDEX: Coming soon
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