Causal Chain & Root-Cause Correlation
Availability: Team, Business, and Enterprise plans
Getting three separate alerts at 3 AM — SSL expiry, DNS resolution failure, HTTP monitor down — is confusing and slow to diagnose. Causal chain correlation links them together automatically.
How it works
When a monitor goes down, StatusPage.me checks your recent tool-monitor alerts for the same domain. If an SSL certificate alert or domain expiry alert fired in the last 10 minutes for the same domain, that information is attached to the down notification as a possible root cause hint.
Example notification:
🔴 Monitor down: api.example.com
Error: connection refused
Last success: 5 minutes ago
Failing regions: us-east, eu-west
Possible root cause: SSL certificate for api.example.com is expiring soon
(certificate expires in 2 days — ssl_expiring_soon alert fired at 03:14 UTC)
What triggers a root-cause hint
The following tool monitor events can populate the root-cause hint:
| Tool alert type | Hint shown |
|---|---|
| SSL certificate expiring soon | “SSL certificate expiring soon — may be causing TLS handshake failures” |
| SSL certificate error | “SSL alert for domain: [error message]” |
The lookup is best-effort: if no related tool alert is found, or the tool monitor’s domain doesn’t match, the down notification is sent without a root-cause hint.
Setup
No special configuration is needed. Causal chain correlation is automatic for Team+ accounts that have:
- An SSL monitor configured for the relevant domain.
- A regular HTTP/API monitor for the same domain.
When the SSL monitor fires, and the regular monitor goes down shortly after, the correlation appears in the down notification automatically.
Plan availability
| Feature | Free | Starter | Team | Business | Enterprise |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Causal chain hints in down notifications | — | — | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |