Website monitoring terms, explained.

A

• API An API, short for Application Programming Interface, is a set of agreed rules that lets one program ask another program for data or for an action, without knowing how the other program works inside.

D

• DNS Resolution DNS resolution is the lookup that turns a domain name such as example.com into the IP addresses a browser connects to.
• Downtime Downtime is a period during which a website or service is unavailable or not working as it should for the people who use it.

H

• HTTP Status Codes HTTP status codes are three-digit numbers that a web server sends with every response to say whether a request succeeded, needs further action, or failed, and on whose side.

I

• Incident An incident is a confirmed period of trouble: it starts when a problem has been verified and ends when the service has recovered.

M

• Maintenance window A maintenance window is a period announced in advance during which planned work, such as a deployment or migration, may make a service unavailable.
• MCP MCP, short for Model Context Protocol, is an open standard that lets an AI assistant connect to outside tools and data in one agreed way, so that the assistant can look things up in a service instead of guessing.

R

• Response Time Response time is the time between sending a request to a website and receiving its answer, measured in milliseconds.

S

• SLA A service level agreement (SLA) is a contract between a provider and a customer that states the level of service the provider commits to, how it is measured, and what follows if it is not met.
• SSL Certificate An SSL/TLS certificate is a digital document that ties a website's name to a public key, so browsers can confirm who they are talking to and encrypt the connection.

U

• Uptime Uptime is the share of a chosen period during which a website or service is available, usually written as a percentage.