Regional monitoring

Why one global number is not enough, and how per-region results are produced.

A provider is not equally reachable from everywhere, and a single global percentage hides exactly the thing a reader wants to know. A host that is flawless in Frankfurt and unreachable from São Paulo has a very good global average and is useless to somebody in Brazil.

How a region gets its own verdict

Every measurement carries where it was taken. Workers are grouped by country, countries by continent, and each group produces its own consensus from the measurements taken inside it. A provider's status page shows the resulting breakdown.

The same rules apply at every level. A region with too few independent workers reporting does not get a confident verdict; it gets "not enough data", which is a different statement from "healthy" and is displayed as one.

Worst-case, not average

Where a group has to be summarised into one state, the summary takes the worst state in the group rather than the average of it. A continent containing one country in outage is not "mostly fine": for the people in that country it is an outage, and averaging it away would report the experience of nobody.

Address space that has no place

Some announced addresses cannot be placed geographically at all. They are measured, and they are reported, but they are not counted as a country. A block holding a large share of a provider's address space with no location must not read as a country with that share of its traffic, and it must not be silently dropped either: it is measured space, and the totals have to add up.

Coverage is stated, not implied

Every headline figure on a status page says what it was measured across: how many countries, how many networks, how many independent workers. A 99.2% uptime figure over a provider announcing space in a dozen countries means something quite different depending on how many of them anybody looked at, and the difference between "99.2%" and "99.2%, measured across four countries by two workers" is the whole of it.

What regional gaps are not

A region with no coverage is a region nobody is measuring from, not a region where the provider is failing. The two are drawn differently and always will be. See Missing monitoring data.