Have you ever wondered—
If your production backend or database service crashes, how fast do you actually get notified, and how quickly can you jump into troubleshooting?
My Personal Research:
🏭 Typical Industrial Use Case
If a Prometheus + Alertmanager setup is properly tuned, you usually get notified within 1–1.5 minutes.
⏱️ As-Fast-As-Possible Estimated Timeline Theory
Scrape Interval
Let’s assume Prometheus scrapes metrics every 15–30 seconds, which is common in well-optimized setups.
If we take 15 seconds as the fastest scenario, the earliest delay starts here.
Rule Evaluation Interval
After scraping, alerting rules are evaluated every 15 seconds.
Rules Manifest (for: 1m or reduced)
Assume you've configured the rule such that if the service is down for 10 seconds, Prometheus should fire an alert.
Alertmanager buffering (minimal assumptions)
Ignoring group_wait, group_interval, repeat_interval to keep it raw—
Let’s assume Alertmanager needs ~10 seconds to process and send the first notification.
📌 Combined Timeline
Putting it all together:
- Scrape delay → ~15s
- Rule evaluation delay → ~15s
- Down detection threshold → ~10s
- Alertmanager handling → ~10s
- Network jitter → (Optional small fluctuation)
👉 Total: ~50 seconds – ~1 minute
In real-world noisy networks → up to 1.5 minutes
This means you start taking action 1–1.5 minutes after the actual outage.
During this time, your data loss may be small or large—depending on how critical the endpoint is.
But for mission-critical endpoints, data loss will happen.
🚀 But what if you could know within just 10 seconds?
Imagine receiving outage alerts ~50 seconds earlier than Prometheus.
Not just faster alerts—you could:
- Closely monitor application behavior in real-time
- Understand performance patterns
- Visualize dependency graphs
- Analyze blast radius
- Improve MTTR, SLA, SPOF detection
- Perform critical path analysis
- And much more...
Introducing Pulsimo 🎉
An on-premise focused endpoint monitoring platform designed to give ultra-fast detection and deep observability.
Currently in public beta.
Any kind of feedback is truly appreciated.
If anyone is interested in contributing — feel free to reach out!
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