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Glossary

Quick definitions of the terms you’ll meet throughout Aloft, in alphabetical order.

A Bearer token (prefixed ur_) that authenticates requests to the /api/v1 REST API. Keys are scoped to one organization, shown in full only once at creation, and managed by admins. See API and integrations.

A reusable notification destination — email, Slack, Discord, a signed webhook, and more. You define a channel once and attach it to any monitors that should alert through it. See Channels.

A single execution of a monitor’s probe — one request, ping, or certificate read — recorded with its result and response time. Checks run on the monitor’s interval.

The requirement that a monitor fail a configured number of consecutive checks before Aloft opens an incident. This prevents a single transient blip from paging anyone.

A monitor state where the check succeeded but the response was slower than the configured response-time threshold. The endpoint is reachable but sluggish; degraded still counts as “up” for uptime calculations.

A monitor type that waits for your job to check in (by posting to an ingest URL) instead of Aloft probing outward. If the expected check-in doesn’t arrive within the interval plus grace period, the monitor goes down. See Heartbeat monitors.

A period during which a monitor is down. Aloft opens an incident when enough consecutive checks fail and resolves it when checks pass again, recording the total downtime. See Incidents.

A planned time range during which Aloft suppresses incidents and alerts for the covered monitors, so scheduled work doesn’t trigger false alarms. See Maintenance windows.

A single thing you want Aloft to watch — a URL, TCP port, host, TLS certificate, domain registration, or background job. Each monitor has a type, schedule, and its own status. See Monitors overview.

The container that owns everything in Aloft — monitors, channels, status pages, and API keys. You belong to at least one organization and can be a member of several. See Teams & roles.

A location from which checks can be executed, letting Aloft probe a target from more than one vantage point so a single network path doesn’t skew results.

A member’s permission level within an organization (such as admin). Roles gate sensitive actions — for example, managing API keys requires admin. See Teams & roles.

A periodic aggregation of raw check rows into summarized buckets, so uptime and response-time history stay fast to query and storage stays bounded over time.

A safety filter that blocks probes and webhook deliveries from reaching private, loopback, or cloud-metadata addresses by default. An admin can relax it with ALLOW_INSECURE_TARGETS=1 to monitor internal hosts.

A public, shareable page that displays the live status and uptime history of selected monitors. Anyone with the link can view it. See the Status pages section in the top navigation.