Multi-Region Uptime Monitoring: Why Geographic Diversity Matters

The Global Internet Isn’t Uniform

When your website goes down, it might not be down for everyone. Common scenarios where geographic monitoring saves the day:

1. Regional ISP Issues

Your site might be perfectly accessible from North America but completely unreachable from Europe due to a routing problem with a European ISP. Single-location monitoring would miss this entirely.

2. CDN Edge Node Failures

If you use a CDN like Cloudflare or AWS CloudFront, edge servers can fail independently. A user in Sydney might get errors while users in New York see everything working fine.

3. DNS Propagation Problems

DNS changes don’t propagate instantly or evenly. One region might resolve to old (working) IPs while another resolves to incorrect or down servers.

4. Government Firewalls

Some countries block or throttle international traffic. If your audience is global, you need to know if your site is accessible in those markets.

How Multi-Region Monitoring Works

HITS Scout operates monitoring agents in multiple continents:

  • US East (Virginia): Primary North American checks
  • EU West (Ireland): European accessibility
  • Asia Pacific (Sydney): Australian/Oceanian reach
  • Asia Pacific (Singapore): Southeast Asian coverage

Each check cycle randomly selects one region to perform the health check. Over time, this provides comprehensive global coverage without redundant pings from every region on every check.

Alert Strategy for Regional Failures

Not every regional failure requires an immediate alert. Our smart alerting system:

  1. Requires multiple consecutive failures (default: 2) before alerting
  2. Tracks failures by region to identify geographic patterns
  3. Verifies the primary URL if any discovered link fails
  4. Includes region information in alerts so you know where the problem is

Example Alert Scenario

⚠️ Downtime Alert: example.com

Status: 503 Service Unavailable
Region: EU West (Ireland)
Consecutive Failures: 2
Last Working: 8 minutes ago
Response Time: Timeout (30s)

This indicates a potential CDN edge issue in Europe.
US East checks remain healthy.

Real-World Case Studies

Case 1: Cloudflare Edge Node Failure

A customer’s site went down for users in Australia due to a failing Cloudflare edge server in Sydney. Their single-region monitor (US-based) showed everything green. Our multi-region monitoring detected the Sydney outage within 5 minutes, and they were able to purge the edge cache and restore service.

Downtime detected by HITS Scout: 5 minutes
Would have gone unnoticed for: ~3 hours (until customer complaints)

Case 2: DNS Misconfiguration

During a DNS provider migration, an incorrect record was propagated to European resolvers but not US ones. US-based monitoring showed no issues, but European users couldn’t reach the site.

Detected by EU West agent: 2 minutes after propagation
Fixed before: 95% of European users noticed

Case 3: ISP Routing Loop

A major ISP in Asia had a routing loop affecting a specific IP range. Australian users experienced timeouts while traffic from other regions worked fine.

Regional context provided: Immediate identification that issue was geographic, not application-level
Resolution time: Reduced from hours to minutes by knowing exactly where the problem was

Choosing Your Monitoring Regions

Not every site needs global monitoring. Here’s when each approach makes sense:

Single-Region Monitoring (Good for:)

  • Local businesses serving one country
  • Internal tools with known user location
  • Minimal CDN or DNS complexity

Multi-Region Monitoring (Essential for:)

  • E-commerce with international customers
  • SaaS platforms with global user base
  • Sites behind CDNs (Cloudflare, Fastly, etc.)
  • Any mission-critical service where downtime = revenue loss

HITS Scout’s Approach

Our multi-region monitoring includes:

  • Randomized region selection per check cycle for coverage without redundancy
  • Response time tracking by region to identify geographic latency issues
  • Region-tagged alert history for post-mortem analysis
  • Configurable alerting thresholds to prevent false alarms

Pricing Tiers

  • Free: Single-region monitoring only (US East)
  • Pro: Multi-region monitoring across all 4 locations
  • Enterprise: Multi-region + custom agent deployment in your preferred locations

Start monitoring from multiple regions →

FAQ

Q: Do you check from all regions on every interval?
A: No. We randomly select one region per check to provide coverage without redundant requests. This balances cost and effectiveness.

Q: Can I prioritize checks from specific regions?
A: Not yet, but region preferences are on the roadmap for Pro and Enterprise plans.

Q: What if I need monitoring from a region you don’t cover?
A: Enterprise customers can request custom agent deployments in specific AWS, GCP, or Azure regions.

Q: How do I interpret regional performance differences?
A: Response time variations across regions are normal due to network distance. Consistent timeouts or errors from one region indicate a problem.

Q: Do you support IPv6?
A: Not currently. IPv6 support is planned for Q2 2025.