Setting Your Primary Monitoring Region
Your primary region is the location that runs your monitor’s scheduled check at every interval. Secondary regions sit idle and only activate when your primary detects a problem — confirming whether it is a real outage or a regional blip.
Paid plan users can choose any active region as their primary. Free plan users run from the default region (Munich, Central Europe).
Why Your Primary Region Choice Matters
By default, all monitors check from Munich. If most of your users are in the United States or Asia Pacific, Munich is a poor anchor — it may miss latency problems your actual users experience, or produce false positives from European network events that don’t affect anyone else.
Choosing a primary region closer to your user base means:
- Faster, more relevant detection — issues your users notice get flagged first
- Fewer false positives — transient problems in a region you don’t care about won’t wake you up
- Accurate response time data — latency figures reflect what real users see
How Primary and Secondary Regions Work Together
The two region roles have very different jobs:
| Role | When it runs | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
| Primary | Every check interval (e.g. every 60 seconds) | Runs your scheduled check; triggers confirmation if it sees a failure |
| Secondary | Only when the primary reports a failure | Confirms whether the failure is real or a primary-region glitch |
When the primary reports your service as down, all of your selected secondary regions immediately run a one-time confirmation check. The result:
- Enough secondaries confirm down → real outage; incident is created, alerts fire
- Secondaries report up → regional glitch; no incident recorded, no alerts sent
This quorum-based approach is described in detail in Monitoring Accuracy & Detection Tracking.
Plan Requirements
| Plan | Primary region | Secondary regions |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Munich (fixed) | None |
| Pro | Any region | Up to 2 |
| Growth | Any region | Up to 3 |
| Business | Any region | Up to 4 |
| Enterprise | Any region | Unlimited |
The total number of locations (primary + secondaries) counts against your plan’s location allowance. See Plan Limits & Quotas for a full breakdown.
Changing Your Primary Region
- Go to Monitors → Locations in your dashboard
- Each region card shows a star button (☆) in the top-right corner
- Click the star on the region you want to set as primary — it turns filled (★) and the card gains a blue border
- Ensure the region is also checked (it will be checked automatically when you set it as primary)
- Click Save Locations
The change takes effect on the next scheduled check cycle.
Free plan: The star buttons are not shown. Munich is always selected as your primary and cannot be changed. Upgrade your plan to unlock region selection.
Choosing the Right Primary Region
Match your primary to your users, not your servers.
| Scenario | Recommended primary |
|---|---|
| US-based SaaS, majority US users | US East or US West |
| European e-commerce | Western or Central Europe |
| Global API | Whichever region your highest-traffic users are in |
| Single-region app | The region closest to your infrastructure |
Your primary region should be the one where a real outage would first become visible to your users. Secondary regions can be anywhere — their job is simply to verify.
Fallback Behaviour
If your chosen primary region’s agent becomes unavailable (no heartbeat in the last 2 minutes), the scheduler automatically falls back to running the check from Munich. You will not receive a separate alert for this — your monitors continue running without interruption while the preferred agent recovers.
Once the agent comes back online, subsequent checks automatically resume from your chosen primary region.
Relationship to Secondary Region Selection
The same Monitors → Locations page controls both which region is primary and which additional regions are active as secondaries. Any checked region that is not your primary becomes a secondary confirmation region.
- Your primary is always included in the active set (it is automatically checked)
- You cannot deselect your primary without first assigning another region as primary
- The global platform primary (Munich) remains checked for free plan users and cannot be removed
See Choosing Monitor Locations for guidance on which secondary regions to add.
What’s Next?
- Choosing Monitor Locations — add secondary regions alongside your primary
- Monitoring Accuracy & Detection Tracking — understand quorum confirmation and detection delay metrics
- Adaptive Post-Incident Monitoring — speed up re-detection right after a recovery
- Plan Limits & Quotas — see how many regions your plan supports
- Setting Up Monitor Alerts — configure who gets notified when the quorum confirms an outage