This glossary defines the key terms used throughout PulseAPI and this Help Center.
Alert Rule A condition you configure that tells PulseAPI when to create an incident and send a notification. Each rule has a condition type (status code, response time, uptime, or SSL expiry), an operator, a threshold, a scope, and assigned notification channels.
Check A single HTTP request PulseAPI makes to a monitor. Checks happen automatically on the configured check interval. Each check records the status, HTTP status code, response time, and any error details.
Check History The log of all checks for a given monitor. How far back history is retained depends on your plan (7 days on Free, up to 365 days on Team).
Check Interval How often PulseAPI makes a check to a monitor, expressed in seconds. The minimum interval depends on your plan: 60s (Free/Starter), 15s (Professional), 5s (Team).
Cooldown Period A setting on alert rules that prevents the rule from firing more than once within the specified time window. For example, a 30-minute cooldown means the rule can fire at most once every 30 minutes for the same monitor. Prevents notification spam during sustained failures.
Endpoint A URL you want PulseAPI to monitor. Also called a "monitor" in the PulseAPI interface. Endpoints can be any HTTP/HTTPS URL.
False Positive An alert that fires when the monitored service is actually healthy. Caused by transient network issues, brief server hiccups, or overly sensitive alert thresholds. See Understanding and Reducing False Positives.
Incident A record of a problem with a monitor, created when a check failure matches an alert rule. Incidents move through three statuses: open, acknowledged, resolved.
MTTD (Mean Time to Detect) The average time between a failure starting and an incident being detected and reported. Faster check intervals and lower cooldown periods reduce MTTD.
MTTR (Mean Time to Resolve) The average time between an incident being created and being resolved. A key reliability metric — lower is better.
Monitor Another name for an endpoint in PulseAPI. The URL you configure for PulseAPI to check.
Notification Channel A delivery destination for alert notifications: an email address, a Slack channel, or a webhook URL. Channels are assigned to alert rules.
Planned Outage (Maintenance Window) A scheduled time period during which incident detection is suppressed for selected monitors. Use this to prevent false alerts during planned maintenance or deployments.
Project A way to group related monitors within a team. Projects are organizational only — they don't affect monitoring behavior.
Pulse AI PulseAPI's AI-powered incident analysis feature. When an incident is created, Pulse AI analyzes the check data and generates a summary of likely causes and recommended next steps. Available on Starter, Professional, and Team plans (rate-limited).
Response Time How long PulseAPI's check request took from the moment the request was sent to when the full response was received, in milliseconds.
SLA (Service Level Agreement) A commitment about service availability, typically expressed as a percentage of uptime (e.g., 99.9% uptime = no more than ~8.7 hours of downtime per year).
SSL Certificate A digital certificate that enables HTTPS. PulseAPI can monitor SSL certificates and alert you before they expire.
SSL Expiry Alert An alert rule condition that fires when an SSL certificate will expire within a specified number of days (e.g., less than 14 days).
Team A workspace in PulseAPI shared by one or more users. All monitors, projects, incidents, alert rules, and notification channels belong to a team.
Uptime The percentage of checks that succeeded (returned the expected status code within the timeout) over a given time period. Expressed as a percentage (e.g., 99.95%).
Uptime Heatmap A visualization in the monitor detail view showing uptime status across time periods. Each cell represents a time block — green for up, red for down, gray for no data.
Webhook An HTTP callback — PulseAPI sends a JSON payload to a URL you provide when an incident is created or resolved. Use webhooks to integrate with any tool that accepts HTTP POST requests.
Still have questions? Contact support.