Service Monitor - Only During Business Hours

Does anyone know if you can have a service monitor that only triggers alerts during certain hours?

Use Case: We have a client with a certain LOB application. We have to shut the service down during the night-time to take a good backup. But we only want to get alerts or generate tickets if the service turns off during work hours.

What you would do is set it up so that it fires (all the time), and then in Automated Remediation you’d listen for that alert and then apply the during business hours condition.

You can also use a script on a schedule to flip the asset into maintenance mode for x hours. This should suppress the alerts.

@Andy What would happen if the alert fires outside of business hours and we had an automated remediation for during business hours? Would it complete the actions of the automated remediation once it hit’s business hours? or would it just ignore it since it wasn’t created during business hours. Also what would happen to subsequent service shutdown/crashes that happen during business hours if one occurred the night before. Wouldn’t we have to automatically clear the alerts outside of business hours for another one to generate the correct alert?

It would ignore the AR, but the alert would still be generated. It would not defer the Automated Remediation.

If an alert was tripped overnight that did nothing (because AR was set to only fire during business hours) then subsequent alerts wouldn’t fire if they were identical. Normally you’d triage your open alerts from overnight in the morning, and if something fired again it would process your AR normally during business hours.

I know you do best with use case scenarios. We have a client that utilizes Eaglesoft for their dental practice software. We want to monitor if that service shuts down during business hours. But we don’t care when the service shuts down every night for it’s nightly backup. I don’t want my guys to have to clear an alert every morning for something we expect to happen. Any better suggestions for handling service monitoring during business hours only?

That’s a great use case, and yes, there is a way to handle that I believe but it might be a bit annoying to setup and deal with. There technically isn’t a way to ignore RMM alerts directly outside of business hours.

What you can do though is setup two Automated Remediations. One will be when the business is not operating in normal business ours and one will be while operating inside normal business hours. The one outside can have a single action which is just to close the RMM Alert. That will likely fire multiple times throughout the night, but if you have no other actions tied to the alert that shouldn’t matter much. So basically every time it opens it just closes again.

If it fires during business hours then your AR can do what it needs to do. Let me know if that would work for you.

That may be a way to handle it, but I think I’m just going to build the backup into a script that runs through Syncro and enable maintenance mode. Technically I guess I do care if the service shutsoff whenever we’re not expecting it too, so I think the maintenance mode will be more ideal.

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