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User Guide

Multiple server outages

24.1.0
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Multiple server outages

When you have multiple servers and network devices that all go down at the same time, the worst scenario that can happen is to have an avalanche of outage emails, forcing you to wade through all of them in order to find and fix the underlying cause.

We try to help you avoid this situation in several ways. By default, our notification system will merge outage alerts for servers that begin at roughly the same time, provided they’re using the same Alert Timeline. You’ll get one email, SMS, or voice call that lists each of the servers that is down, with full details of each outage.

Also, you can reflect connectivity relationships by setting parent/child dependencies between servers. Whenever an outage for a child server is detected, alerts will only be sent if the parent server is not currently experiencing an outage. Alerts for the parent will include a note about how many children are also down at the same time.

With this functionality, you can setup dependencies such as individual web servers being children of their immediate upstream switch. This way, if your switch fails you’ll get an alert saying the switch is unreachable, and that the 20 servers connected to it also are down. Much easier than getting 21 separate alerts and having to dig through them before you find the root cause.

To setup parent/child dependencies, edit each server in the control panel and you can set the parent. If you have lots of dependencies to setup contact us and we can help with a bulk configuration.

Multiple server outages

When you have multiple servers and network devices that all go down at the same time, the worst scenario that can happen is to have an avalanche of outage emails, forcing you to wade through all of them in order to find and fix the underlying cause.

We try to help you avoid this situation in several ways. By default, our notification system will merge outage alerts for servers that begin at roughly the same time, provided they’re using the same Alert Timeline. You’ll get one email, SMS, or voice call that lists each of the servers that is down, with full details of each outage.

Also, you can reflect connectivity relationships by setting parent/child dependencies between servers. Whenever an outage for a child server is detected, alerts will only be sent if the parent server is not currently experiencing an outage. Alerts for the parent will include a note about how many children are also down at the same time.

With this functionality, you can setup dependencies such as individual web servers being children of their immediate upstream switch. This way, if your switch fails you’ll get an alert saying the switch is unreachable, and that the 20 servers connected to it also are down. Much easier than getting 21 separate alerts and having to dig through them before you find the root cause.

To setup parent/child dependencies, edit each server in the control panel and you can set the parent. If you have lots of dependencies to setup contact us and we can help with a bulk configuration.