The Problem with Single-Region Monitoring
Most monitoring services check your site from a single location. If that location has a network issue, you get a false alarm. If your site is down only in Asia but the monitoring server is in Virginia, you miss the outage entirely. Single-region monitoring is essentially guessing.
How Multi-Region Monitoring Works
Multi-region monitoring checks your endpoints from multiple geographic locations simultaneously. When a check fails, the system verifies from other regions before declaring an incident. This eliminates false positives caused by localized network issues.
Quorum-Based Decisions
FourSight uses a quorum-based approach: a majority of regions must agree that a service is down before an incident is created. This means a transient network issue in one region won't wake you up at 3 AM.
Regional Failure Detection
When only some regions report failures, FourSight can distinguish between a localized issue (CDN problem, regional DNS failure) and a full outage. This context helps you respond appropriately.
Monitoring a Commercial SaaS?
FourSight includes 25 commercial-safe monitors with multi-region validation.
Start Monitoring FreeChoosing Your Monitoring Regions
Select monitoring regions that match your user base. If 80% of your users are in North America and Europe, prioritize those regions. Add Asia-Pacific if you have a global audience. Don't waste resources monitoring from regions where you have no users.
Recommended region configurations:
US-focused SaaS: us-east, us-west, eu-west
Global SaaS: us-east, eu-west, ap-southeast
Enterprise (strict): us-east, us-west, eu-west, eu-central, ap-southeastLatency vs. Availability
Multi-region monitoring reveals latency variations across geographies. A service that responds in 100ms from US-East but 3000ms from AP-Southeast is effectively degraded for Asian users. Set per-region latency thresholds to catch these performance disparities.
False Positive Elimination
The primary value of multi-region monitoring is eliminating false positives. Every false alarm erodes trust in your monitoring system—eventually your team starts ignoring alerts. Quorum-based multi-region monitoring ensures that when you get an alert, it's real.