Use Case: Using Maintenance Windows to Set Up Alert Schedules

For many of our users reacting to downtime data sent from a monitoring system such as StatusCake is a 24 hour job, and the process incorporates many staff who will have varying responsibilities, and sometimes work quite different hours.  This is particularly true of companies who run “follow-the-sun” with their global dev-ops teams picking up the baton from the last as their time zone starts its working day.

For this reason, it can be very useful to have a method for splitting out which team alerts go to at different times.  Today we’ll take you through a method for using our Maintenance Windows feature in this way.

For example, let’s first use a scenario where you have two separate teams:

• Team A works a 12 hour shift from Midday until Midnight; and
• Team B takes over from Midnight to Midday.

We want each team to only be alerted of downtime during their working hours.

To achieve this you would set-up two tests in StatusCake; each test would be identical to the other, for instance in relation to interval check rate, confirmation servers and so on, however, there would be two differences.

• Test 1 – The Contact Group would be set-up for Team A members and a Maintenance Window for Midnight to Midday set-up.
• Test 2 – The Contact Group would be set-up for Team B members and a Maintenance Window for Midday until Midnight set-up.

This ensures that when the site goes down it will only alert the team on call.  You can, of course, add as many teams to this following the same set-up process – e.g. for three teams add a third test and set the Contact Group and Maintenance Window according.

Once you’ve everything up you will have an on call schedule as shown in the diagram below:

We already have this use-case working for quite a few of our customers who don’t want to use additional third-party integrations to handle alert scheduling.  If you have any questions about this use-case, or indeed have any great use-cases of your own that you’d like to share with us then please let us know.