Kill switch for noisy uptime checks: a feature flag to disable a polling client
Use a kill switch inside the checker when your uptime probes start amplifying an incident — one feature flag, read on every tick, that can disable the noisy checks and stop the retries at the source. Reach for tuned backoff and jitter instead when the retry storm stays inside a single process and never fans out onto a dependency somebody else is paging for. Both are cheap to build. Only one of…
A kill switch can stop noisy uptime checks that amplify incidents during a failure. Use a feature flag read on each tick to disable the checks, preventing retries from causing a retry storm. This approach allows you to quiet a polling client when its target is already experiencing issues. Implement the kill switch in the polling client, not the monitoring configuration, to avoid unnecessary deployments during troubleshooting.
The switch should be stable per probe, with a simple safety valve to revert to the previous decision if the flag fetch fails. Combine a circuit breaker for common cases with the aimable feature flag for specific checks.
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