Along with our recent iPhone client release, we have also included a couple of enhancements to our downtime reporting feature. Just thought of discussing these in greater detail for the benefit of our readers.

Mark Downtime as Maintenance - Exclude maintenance from Downtime Calculation

Lets just say you had taken your websites offline for some maintenance purpose. You most probably don't want to receive alerts for this scheduled downtime and you will not want this downtime to be reflected in your reports as well. In such a scenario, you can use the "mark downtime as maintenance" option and mark this downtime as maintenance in Site24x7. This will not be considered for downtime calculation and will be displayed separately in the availability chart.

You can specify maintenance period in 2 different ways:

1. Create a Maintenance schedule for the monitor: If you know the maintenance time  beforehand or if the downtime is a recurring event, you can create a maintenance schedule for the time period. Once you create a schedule, the site will be automatically marked as 'under Maintenance' for the timeframe of the schedule.
2. Mark downtime as Maintenance: Lets assume you forgot to configure a maintenance schedule and Site24x7 marked your site as down. However, since you know this is scheduled maintenance and don't really need to consider this as downtime, you can use the "Mark Downtime as Maintenance" option and mark the specific downtime as maintenance. Click the Mark as Maintenance icon from the downtime table in the monitor details page to convert a downtime to maintenance period.

Ability to add your own comments to the downtime

A second enhancement that has been included in our service is the option to specify your own comments for the downtimes. These comments can be anything that reflects the nature of the downtime or the reason for the downtime, etc.

These comments can be made public as well, so your visitors can also know the reason why your site went down.

What is your take on our latest enhancements? Feel free to comment or contact us directly for any questions.