The article delves into four types of status checks used in monitoring and alerting systems, specifically host, service, process, and network checks, which are designed to assess the up-or-down status of various components within an infrastructure. Host checks alert administrators when a monitoring agent on a host stops sending signals, while service checks fire alerts if a service fails to connect after consecutive attempts. Process checks, similar to service checks but at a lower level, monitor the status of specific processes, especially useful for custom-built services, and network checks assess the connectivity between locations and endpoints, identifying regional issues. These checks can be applied individually or at a cluster level, where the latter is often preferred to mitigate alert fatigue by alerting on widespread issues rather than isolated incidents. The discussion highlights the importance of actionable alerts, particularly for critical, non-redundant services or widespread failures, ensuring responders have clear remediation steps. The subsequent installment promises to explore more continuous monitoring approaches through timeseries metric evaluations.