Alerting 101: Status checks

This text discusses four types of status checks used for monitoring and alerting on metrics and events from applications and infrastructure. These include host checks, service checks, process checks, and network checks. Host checks monitor the up/down status of a given host, while service checks do the same for services. Process checks are more customizable and can be used to ensure that specific processes are running. Network checks verify connectivity between locations or hosts and an HTTP or TCP endpoint. These checks can often be applied at the individual level or the cluster level, with cluster-level alerts being more effective in monitoring distributed systems. The text also mentions that these status checks will be further discussed in a companion post, which will explore open-ended alerts that evaluate timeseries metrics and their evolution over time.