Archive for the ‘New Features’ Category

We’ve recently added response time alert functionality, a great new feature which generates outage notification whenever a service responds slower than a given threshold value.  Combined with our high-frequency outage monitoring and server-side resource monitoring, response time alerts give you a complete toolset to detect and respond to websites that are responding slowly, before your visitors head elsewhere.

Configuration of the response time alerts is quite simple - when configuring a service check just provide a threshold response time and duration.  Whenever your service responses take longer than the threshold time we begin tracking a potential outage.  If this lasts for longer than the configured duration an alert is generated and delivered according to your notification schedule.

Response time alerts are included with the Intermediate and Advanced packages, and can be configured through the Edit Service interface. Trial customers also have full access to response time alerts for the duration of the trial.

We’re quite excited to add this new functionality to our offering, and have a number of other features currently under development that will further help you minimize disruptions to your online infrastructure.  Feel free to contact Support if you have any questions about the configuration and usage of response time alerts or other suggestions on how we can help improve your online operations.

As of this morning, voice outage alerts are now live for all Panopta customers to use - in addition to SMS and email outage alerts, you can now get a phone call and have details of active outages read to you over the phone. For all packages, both trial and paying, voice alerts are counted as part of the SMS quota, so customers on the Basic Monitoring package and above will get unlimited voice alerts included with their account.

Thanks to all of our beta testers who have been trying the service for the past month or so - their feedback and suggestions have been quite helpful!

Voice alerts can be activated now in the contacts section of the monitoring control panel.  If you have any questions on the voice alerts, feel free to contact our support team for assistance.

We’re happy to announce that our newest feature has just been released for public beta testing.  You can now receive outage alerts via voice phone calls, in addition to email and SMS messages.  This gives you another option for being alerted to any problems with your servers, so you can respond and resolve as quickly as possible.

If you’re interested in joining the public beta program, please let us know and we’ll be glad to enable voice alerts for your account.

At Panopta, we pride ourselves in making sure that you’re notified about problems with your server as soon as possible.  This lets you take action right away to keep your customers happy.

Our unique notification schedules give you lots of control to choose who gets notified when, but what about the times when you don’t want to be notified right away?  We have a solution for that as well with our maintenance schedule feature.  Maintenance schedules let you define a period of time, either one time or recurring, during which you want to modify how outage notifications are handled.  During maintenance, you can either use a different notification schedule or disabled notifications entirely.

As the screenshot below shows, there’s quite a bit of flexibility in how maintenance periods are scheduled, as well as the ability to choose whether to advertise your upcoming maintenance periods in your public reports or exclude outages during the maintenance from availability calculations.

User interface for editing maintenance schedules.

There are lots of potential uses for this, including handling weekly or monthly maintenance windows, using alternate notification schedules at different times of day, and to avoid triggering outage alerts during system upgrades.  If you have ideas for other create uses, please let us know - we’ll publish the best here and in our newsletter.