Using Contact Groups to notify you about downtime is a great way of keeping up to date with the status of your website. But sometimes you need to set up something a little more complex to achieve your alert schedule needs. The recent addition of our Maintenance Windows feature adds in much more flexibility when used in combination with Contact Groups.

An example of where this might be needed: A company has 2 teams, one team works 9 – 5 Monday to Friday, and the other one covers 5 – 9 (the night shifts) and weekends. Both teams are responsible for monitoring the same test, and reacting to downtime. Both of their contact groups are added to this test so that they will both receive alerts on downtime. The problem here is that the night shift will be getting alerted to the daytime downtime, and they day workers will be getting woken up by alerts at night.

In order to fix this problem we can use Maintenance Windows to disable the alerts at certain times per contact group. First thing to do is duplicate the test, secondly each test should contain one of the groups, one should have the group for the day shift, the other for the night shift. Now that we have the seperate tests we have taken the first step, but essentially we are still in the same situation where both groups will receive alerts, this is when we start to add in the Windows.

The first window we want is simple, and applies to the Day Shift test. This window needs to run from 9am-9am(All day, 1440 minutes) on Saturday and Sunday, adding this in will disable alerts to this team on both of these days. The second window for this test needs to disable alerts received outside of working hours for this group, so we would set it to run from perhaps 5pm to 9am – which gives us what we want. With these 2 windows added, the Day shift test is now complete.

For the Night Shift test we only need 1 Maintenance Window, this window will simply prevent the group from receiving alerts during working time (9-5 Monday-Friday), and the group would therefore receive all other alerts outside of this time, completing our task.

This is just one example of what can currently be achieved through combining maintenance windows and Contact Groups.