Core concepts

A quick tour of the terms you’ll see throughout Spectra.

Monitor

A monitor is one thing you’re watching — a URL, an API endpoint, a host and port, a cron job, or a certificate. Each monitor has a type, a target, a check interval, and the regions it runs from.

Check

A check is a single execution of a monitor from one region at one point in time. Checks record the result (up/down), response time, and any assertion outcomes.

Region

A region is a probe location Spectra checks from. Monitoring from multiple regions — including North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific — reflects what your users actually experience and enables confirmation.

Multi-region confirmation

Before opening an incident, Spectra confirms a failure from two or more regions and applies a consecutive-failure threshold. This is what keeps a single network blip from paging your team.

Incident

When a monitor is confirmed down, Spectra opens an incident — a record with a timeline of what happened and when, which you can acknowledge, assign, and later turn into a post-incident review. See Incident management.

Alert channel

An alert channel is a destination for notifications — Slack, Teams, Discord, email, SMS, voice, or a webhook. Attach channels to monitors and route them with on-call rules.

Data retention

Monitoring history (uptime, response times, incidents) is retained according to your plan’s retention window. See Pricing.