Concepts and glossary
The product uses a small set of nouns consistently. When the docs say “attach a notification group to a monitor,” every word means a specific thing. This page defines them.
Monitoring vocabulary
Section titled “Monitoring vocabulary”Monitor
Section titled “Monitor”The umbrella term for any scheduled health check. SiteQwality has five monitor families: HTTP, SSL/TLS, DNS, cron heartbeat, and browser. The dashboard’s Monitors view lists all of them together.
A single execution of a monitor — one HTTP request, one DNS lookup, one TLS handshake. Each check produces a result (success, failure, plus latency and any captured payload). Multiple regions running the same monitor produce multiple checks per tick.
Run interval
Section titled “Run interval”How often a monitor’s checks fire. Free plan minimum is 60 seconds; paid plans go down to 30 seconds. Browser checks have their own discrete intervals (5m, 10m, 15m, 30m, 1h).
Region
Section titled “Region”A geographic location SiteQwality runs checks from. Default is us-east-1. Multi-region requires a paid plan; see the HTTP checks reference for the full list.
Min healthy regions
Section titled “Min healthy regions”When a monitor runs in N regions, this knob says “consider the monitor failing only if fewer than M regions report healthy.” Set it equal to N to require unanimity, or to 1 to tolerate any single region failing.
Incident vocabulary
Section titled “Incident vocabulary”Incident
Section titled “Incident”An open record of “something is broken.” Incidents are opened automatically when a monitor flips from healthy to failing, or manually via API/dashboard. Each incident has:
- Status —
investigating→identified→monitoring→resolved. - Severity —
minor,major, orcritical. - Responder status —
triggered(no one’s looking),acknowledged(someone’s on it), orresolved. - Updates — a chronological log of status changes, posted internally and (optionally) to the public status page.
Auto-created incidents have auto_created: true; manually created ones do not.
Incident update
Section titled “Incident update”A single timeline entry on an incident — a change of status with a written message (“We’ve identified a database failover; recovery in progress”). Posted via the dashboard or POST /incident/{id}/update.
Acknowledgement
Section titled “Acknowledgement”When a responder claims an incident, its responder_status flips from triggered to acknowledged. This stops further escalation but doesn’t resolve the incident.
On-call vocabulary
Section titled “On-call vocabulary”On-call schedule
Section titled “On-call schedule”A named rotation of users that produces “who’s on call right now” given a timestamp. Each schedule has one or more layers stacked in priority order, plus optional overrides.
A single rotation rule: which users participate, how often they hand off (daily, weekly, custom_days), at what time of day, optionally bounded by an effective_from / effective_until window. Higher-priority layers override lower ones during their effective window.
Override
Section titled “Override”A hard “user X is on call from time A to time B” entry that beats every layer. Used for “I’m covering for Alice while she’s on holiday.”
Rotation type
Section titled “Rotation type”daily— handoff every day athandoff_time.weekly— handoff once a week, onhandoff_day(0=Sunday, 6=Saturday) athandoff_time.custom_days— handoff everyrotation_interval_daysdays.
Escalation vocabulary
Section titled “Escalation vocabulary”Escalation policy
Section titled “Escalation policy”A named pipeline of “who to page if no one acknowledges.” Has an ordered list of levels and an optional repeat_count for what to do after exhausting the list.
Escalation level
Section titled “Escalation level”One step in the pipeline. Specifies a timeout_minutes (how long to wait for an ack before moving on) and a list of targets — target_user_ids (page these humans directly) and target_schedule_ids (page whoever’s on-call in these schedules right now).
Repeat count
Section titled “Repeat count”After running through every level, how many full cycles to repeat before giving up. 0 means stop after one pass.
Notification vocabulary
Section titled “Notification vocabulary”Notification (channel)
Section titled “Notification (channel)”One delivery destination at the account level. Type-specific:
email→ an email addresssms→ a phone numberslack→ a channel inside a Slack integrationwebhook,discord,telegram,microsoft_teams→ reference an integration
A notification belongs to a notification group — it’s not attached to monitors directly.
Notification group
Section titled “Notification group”A bundle of notification channels that monitors attach to. Optionally has delay_send_after_minutes (wait this long before paging — useful for flapping checks) and resend_every_minutes (re-page periodically until acknowledged).
Contact method
Section titled “Contact method”A user’s personal way to be reached: their email, their phone for SMS, their phone for calls, their Slack DM. Distinct from a notification channel — channels are to a destination; contact methods are to a person. On-call and escalation pages route to contact methods, not channels.
Notification rule
Section titled “Notification rule”A user’s personal preference: “for high-urgency incidents, SMS me at 0 min, phone-call me at 5 min, email me at 15 min.” Stacks multiple rules with increasing delays per urgency level.
Urgency
Section titled “Urgency”Either high (wakes someone up) or low (informational). Set per incident; user notification rules are scoped to one urgency at a time.
Maintenance vocabulary
Section titled “Maintenance vocabulary”Maintenance window
Section titled “Maintenance window”A time range during which monitors with matching tags are silenced — they still run, but failures don’t open incidents and don’t fire notifications. Useful for planned deploys.
Two flavors:
- One-time — a single
starts_at/ends_atpair. - Recurring — a recurrence rule (e.g. “every Sunday 2am-4am UTC”).
Status page maintenance
Section titled “Status page maintenance”A separate object — not a maintenance window — that publishes “scheduled maintenance” cards on the public status page. Doesn’t silence anything; purely communicative. See Status page maintenance.
Status page vocabulary
Section titled “Status page vocabulary”Status page
Section titled “Status page”A public, branded page at <your-id>.siteqwality.com (or your custom domain) showing the current and historical state of components you choose to publish.
Status page component
Section titled “Status page component”A monitor (HTTP check or browser check) attached to a status page with a public-facing friendly_name and optional sla_target_percentage. The component’s status is the underlying monitor’s status.
Subscriber
Section titled “Subscriber”A visitor who’s opted in to be notified when the status page publishes an incident or maintenance. Email by default; webhook subscribers also exist.
Observability vocabulary
Section titled “Observability vocabulary”Metric
Section titled “Metric”A numeric time-series — gauge (current value), counter (monotonically increasing), or histogram (distribution of values bucketed by le). Tagged with key/value pairs for filtering and grouping.
A discrete event with a timestamp, level, message, and arbitrary structured metadata. Stored in ClickHouse, queried with the SiteQwality query syntax.
A distributed-tracing object: one trace = one logical request, made up of many spans. Each span has a service name, operation name, duration, and structured attributes. SiteQwality follows OpenTelemetry conventions.
RUM (Real User Monitoring)
Section titled “RUM (Real User Monitoring)”Telemetry collected from real browsers via the @siteqwality/rum SDK: page-load timings, web-vitals, errors, user actions, resource timing.
RUM application
Section titled “RUM application”One SDK installation, identified by an application_id and a client_token. Each app you instrument is a separate application — typically one per domain or one per major build.
Session replay
Section titled “Session replay”A reconstructable video of a user session, recorded by the RUM SDK. Privacy-aware (mask_inputs, mask_text). Activated only when a session filter matches the session.
Account vocabulary
Section titled “Account vocabulary”Account
Section titled “Account”The top-level billing entity. One account = one subscription = one set of monitors, dashboards, and integrations.
A person with login credentials, scoped to one or more accounts. Roles are per-account.
API key
Section titled “API key”An account-scoped Bearer token (sq_live_...) used for programmatic access. Generate under Settings → API keys.