Glossary · Monitoring

Recovery Notification

A recovery notification is the alert a monitoring system sends when a failing service becomes healthy again, closing the loop on a down alert.

Updated October 21, 2026

A recovery notification (or "up" alert) is sent when a monitor that was failing passes its checks again. It normally includes the end time and how long the incident lasted.

Why it matters

Without it, an engineer who gets a down alert at 3 a.m. cannot tell whether the problem fixed itself two minutes later or is still ongoing. Recovery messages let people go back to sleep, stop investigating a self-healed blip, and update customers promptly. They also provide the data for downtime reports and SLA calculations.

Example

[DOWN] shop.example.com - HTTP 503 - 02:14 UTC
[UP]   shop.example.com - HTTP 200 - 02:19 UTC (down for 5m 12s)

Good recovery handling usually includes:

  • A required number of consecutive passes (often 1 to 3) before declaring recovery.
  • The same channel and thread as the original alert.
  • Automatic resolution of the incident on your status page.

Recovery rules should mirror the failure rules. If it takes two failures to open an incident, it should take at least one success to close it, ideally more for unstable services.

Common mistakes

  • Closing the incident on the first success of a flapping service, producing a stream of down/up messages.
  • Sending recoveries to a different channel than alerts.
  • Never sending them, so open incidents pile up.

Get notified when this term updates

Plus occasional practical tips on uptime and monitoring, nothing else. Unsubscribe anytime.

Keep reading

Glossary · MonitoringAlert (Monitoring)A monitoring alert is an automatic notification sent when a check or metric crosses a defined condition, such as a site failing to respond.Glossary · MonitoringAlert DeduplicationAlert deduplication merges repeated alerts about the same underlying problem into one incident, so responders are notified once rather than hundreds of times.Glossary · MonitoringAvailabilityAvailability is the share of time a service is working and reachable when users need it, usually expressed as a percentage over a defined period.Guide · MonitoringAlert Fatigue and On-Call Basics for Small TeamsSet severity levels, escalation paths, alert thresholds and runbooks so a small team gets paged for real problems only and still sleeps through the night.8 min readGuide · MonitoringCron Job Heartbeat Monitoring to Catch Silent Failures EarlyLearn how heartbeat monitoring catches silent cron failures, with copy-ready examples for crontab, systemd, GitHub Actions, Docker, WP-Cron, Laravel and more.9 min readGuide · MonitoringA Blameless Incident Postmortem Template With a Worked ExampleWrite a blameless incident postmortem that drives real fixes: timeline, root cause vs contributing factors, 5 whys limits, a copy-paste template and an example.10 min read

This page is general information written by our editorial team and updated when documentation changes. Servers and providers differ, so test changes safely first. See our editorial policy and disclaimer.