The words we use, defined.
Short, plain-English definitions for the uptime, status page, and reliability terms that show up across PingPane's docs, blog, and dashboard. One concept per page, linked everywhere relevant.
- Term
downtime
Any period during which a service is unavailable or degraded for end users. The inverse of uptime.
- Term
five nines
99.999% availability — about five minutes of downtime per year. The aspirational target for critical infrastructure.
- Term
heartbeat
An inverted check — your service pings the monitor on a schedule, and the monitor alerts when the pings stop.
- Term
incident
A discrete event during which a service was unavailable or degraded, with a defined start, updates, and resolution.
- Term
ISR
Incremental static regeneration — a Next.js rendering mode that serves cached HTML and regenerates it in the background after a TTL.
- Term
MTBF
Mean time between failures — the average uptime between consecutive incidents. A measure of underlying reliability.
- Term
MTTR
Mean time to recovery — the average elapsed time from an incident’s start to its resolution. A core reliability KPI.
- Term
public status page
A customer-facing page that shows the live availability of a service, plus the history of past incidents.
- Term
SLA
Service-level agreement — a contractual promise of a target metric, often availability, with consequences for missing it.
- Term
SSL certificate
A cryptographic credential that authenticates a domain and enables HTTPS. It has an expiry date; let it lapse and the site breaks.
- Term
status page
Any page — public or private — that surfaces the live state of a system. The public variant is the one customers see.
- Term
synthetic check
An automated, scripted interaction with a service that simulates real user behaviour and runs on a schedule.
- Term
uptime
The proportion of time a service is reachable and responding correctly, usually expressed as a percentage over a window.
- Term
uptime monitoring
Periodically probing a URL or endpoint from an external location to detect outages and degraded performance.