How to Set Up Multi-Region Uptime Monitoring

Your site loads fine from your office in San Francisco. Your single-region uptime monitor agrees -- everything looks green. Meanwhile, a customer in Singapore is staring at a 502 and wondering if you even have monitoring in place.

Single-region monitoring has a blind spot. It checks from one location, so it can only tell you about problems visible from that location. If your CDN is serving stale content in Asia, if a DNS change has not propagated to Europe yet, or if a cloud provider is having a regional incident, a single-region check will miss it entirely. Multi-region monitoring solves this by checking from 5 locations simultaneously, giving you a global view of availability.

Why multi-region monitoring matters

Most uptime issues are not total outages. They are partial failures that affect some users but not others. Here are the scenarios that single-region monitoring routinely misses:

• Regional CDN failures. Your CDN edge node in Frankfurt goes down, but the origin in Virginia keeps responding. Users in Central Europe get errors while your monitor in the US sees 200s all day.
• DNS propagation delays. You update a DNS record, and it resolves correctly in North America within minutes. But TTL caching means Asia-Pacific resolvers still point to the old IP for hours. A single check from US East will not catch this.
• Geo-routing bugs. If you use geographic load balancing or region-based routing, a misconfigured rule might send EU traffic to the wrong backend. The only way to catch it is to actually check from the EU.
• Cloud provider regional outages. AWS us-east-1 goes down (it happens more often than anyone would like). If your infrastructure is multi-region but your monitoring is not, you will not know which regions are affected until users start filing tickets.

The common thread: you need eyes in multiple places to see what your users in multiple places are seeing.

How CronAlert's multi-region checks work

Under the hood, CronAlert runs 5 probe workers deployed across Cloudflare's global network. Each probe worker is placed in a specific geographic region using Cloudflare's placement hints, which pin the worker to data centers in that region.

When a multi-region check fires, here is what happens:

1. The orchestrator (the main cron worker) picks up the monitor from the check queue.
2. It dispatches the check to all selected probe workers simultaneously via Service Bindings -- Cloudflare's internal RPC mechanism. The probes are not publicly routable; they communicate over Cloudflare's private backbone, not the public internet.
3. Each probe independently fetches your URL and records the response status, latency, and any errors.
4. The orchestrator collects all probe results, evaluates them against your failure threshold, and decides whether to trigger an alert.
5. Per-region results are stored individually, so you can see exactly which regions are healthy and which are not.

Each multi-region check costs 6 requests total: 1 orchestrator dispatch plus 5 probe executions. This is handled entirely within Cloudflare's infrastructure -- there is no added latency from routing through external services.

Available regions

CronAlert currently checks from 5 regions spread across three continents:

You can select any combination of these regions per monitor. If you only care about US and EU coverage, pick three regions and skip AP Southeast. If your users are global, use all five.

Setting up multi-region monitoring

Configuring a multi-region monitor takes about 30 seconds. You can enable it when creating a new monitor or by editing an existing one.

From your dashboard, click New Monitor or open an existing monitor and click Edit. Enter the URL you want to check.

Toggle the Multi-Region option. This reveals the region selector and failure threshold controls.

Pick which regions you want to check from. You can choose anywhere from 2 to all 5. Think about where your users are -- if 80% of your traffic is North America and Europe, US East, US West, EU West, and EU Central covers your bases.

Choose how many regions need to fail before CronAlert sends an alert. This is the most important decision, and it depends on your use case. More on that in the next section.

Save the monitor. On the next check cycle, you will see individual results from each region on the monitor detail page.

Understanding failure thresholds

The failure threshold is the core tradeoff between sensitivity and noise. CronAlert gives you two approaches:

Alert immediately (threshold = 0)

When the threshold is set to 0, any single region failure triggers an alert. This is the most sensitive option. Use it when:

• You have users in every region and even a partial outage is unacceptable
• You want to catch regional issues the moment they start, even at the cost of occasional false positives from transient network blips
• You are monitoring critical infrastructure where seconds matter

Alert after N regions fail (threshold = N)

When the threshold is set to a specific number, CronAlert only alerts if that many regions fail simultaneously. For example, if you check from 5 regions and set the threshold to 3, you will only be notified if at least 3 out of 5 probes return a non-200 response.

This is the right choice when:

• You want to filter out transient network issues that only affect a single region
• Your application can tolerate partial degradation (e.g., a CDN edge going down briefly while others cover the traffic)
• You want high-confidence alerts -- if 3 out of 5 regions are failing, something is genuinely wrong

When an alert does fire, the notification payload includes a failingRegions array listing exactly which regions returned errors. This means your on-call engineer immediately knows the scope of the problem -- "EU West and EU Central are down, US and AP are fine" -- without needing to open the dashboard.

Reading multi-region results

After enabling multi-region, the monitor detail page shows per-region data for every check:

• Per-region status. Each check shows a pass/fail indicator for every region, so you can spot geographic patterns at a glance.
• Per-region response times. See how latency varies across regions. If your US East response time is 80ms but AP Southeast is 1.2 seconds, that is worth investigating even if both return 200.
• Incident context. When an incident is created from a multi-region failure, the incident detail shows which regions were failing at the time and which have since recovered. This gives you a timeline of how the outage propagated and resolved geographically.

This data is especially useful for identifying chronic regional performance issues that are not outages per se but are degrading the experience for a subset of your users. A monitor that consistently shows 3x higher latency from AP Southeast might point to a missing CDN edge or a poorly placed database replica.

Frequently asked questions

Which plans include multi-region monitoring?

Multi-region monitoring is available on Team ($20/month) and Business ($50/month) plans. Free and Pro plans use single-region checks. You can see the full plan comparison on the pricing page.

Does multi-region monitoring cost extra?

No. It is included in Team and Business plans at no additional charge. There is no per-check fee, no per-region surcharge, and no overage billing. You get multi-region checks on all your monitors if you want them.

Can I pick specific regions instead of using all 5?

Yes. Each monitor can use any combination of the 5 available regions. You might use all 5 for your production API but only US East and EU West for an internal staging service. The choice is per-monitor, so you can tailor it to each endpoint's audience.

How does this affect my request usage on Cloudflare?

Each multi-region check uses 6 requests: 1 orchestrator plus 5 probes. For a monitor with 1-minute intervals, that is 8,640 requests per day per monitor. CronAlert's infrastructure handles this within its Cloudflare Workers allocation -- it does not count against your account's limits.

Getting started

If you are already on a Team or Business plan, multi-region is available right now. Open any monitor, toggle multi-region on, select your regions, and set a failure threshold. Your next check will run from all selected locations.

If you are on the Free or Pro plan and want to try multi-region, upgrade to Team to unlock it along with up to 500 monitors, unlimited status pages, and 90-day log retention.

Single-region monitoring tells you whether your site is up. Multi-region monitoring tells you whether your site is up for everyone. Once you have seen a dashboard full of per-region response times, it is hard to go back to a single green dot and trust that it represents reality.