How to set up a service that only notifies during daylight hours?

#1

Iā€™m trying to set up a new service that only actually pages people during daylight hours (9am-5pm pacific, 7 days a week). Iā€™ve already set up a Schedule that rotates through four people and attached to an Escalation Policy. From what I can see thereā€™s a couple options here.

  1. Set Support Hours on the Service to be 9am-5pm every day, and have the notifications set to low urgency w/no escalation outside of support hours. Then just make sure those participating in the oncall rotation have their low urgency notification settings set accordingly on their User Profiles so they donā€™t get paged. Also to verify, low urgency doesnā€™t escalate, right?

  2. Enable Alert Grouping with a Service Event Rule to suppress Alerts (ie do not create an Incident) for any messages received during certain times (outside the daylight hours). Iā€™m a little vague on how to set this up without having to match on specific conditions like Severity etc so Iā€™d need some help on this option.

Does that sound correct as far as the options to do this? Thank you!

#2

A couple more options:

  • create an event rule that suppresses or changes the severity to info/warning for all (or specific alert types/sources) based on a reoccurring schedule of days and time windows. If you took the suppress all approach, you would not have the alerts or incidents created at all. If you changed severity to info/warning and had the service use severity based notifications, the alert and incident would still be created and someone may be notified (based on their low urgency notification preferences) if they are on-call in your schedules.

  • Set up a cron job to use the API and set the entire service into maintenance mode during the off hours times.

  • Your source monitoring tool(s) may have similar features to control alerting based on day/time schedules as well.

Make sense?

Doug

1 Like
#3

Hey there!

If you set Support Hours for the Service, your ā€œafter hoursā€ incidents will be low-urgency incidents. The on-call responder in the first level of your Escalation Policy will be notified via their low-urgency notification rules. You are correct in that low-urgency incidents do not escalate to the next level of the Escalation Policy.

As Doug mentioned, you could create an Event Rule to configure specific rules during your Support Hours and suppress those that come in outside of your Support Hours. These incidents would remain in a suppressed state.

Alert grouping will group alerts that come in within a 5 minute window. If the Incident is still open overnight, it wonā€™t group alerts.

I hope this helps!

Hannah