There are some occasions when you may want to take your web site, web application or servers offline for some upgrade or maintenance purpose. To prevent your sites or applications from being monitored during the maintenance period, you should configure a maintenance schedule for your monitors and thus avoid unnecessary notifications from Site24x7.

Given below are step-by-step instructions on how to configure a maintenance schedule in Site24x7.

1. Log in to your Site24x7 account and navigate to the Alerts tab.
2. Click Schedule Maintenance->Add Schedule link. The 'Add Schedule' screen will be displayed.
3. Provide details such as schedule name, description, recurrence details (i.e. daily, weekly or once), start time and end time in their respective fields.
4. The ‘Available Monitors’ box will display all the monitors present in your account. Select the required monitors and move it to the ‘Selected Monitors’ box.
5. Click the ‘Add’ button to complete the configuration.

For example, we have configured a maintenance schedule scheduled to run from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM on Sundays.

Add Schedule Screen

The schedule thus created can be viewed from the Alerts tab under Schedule Maintenace->Schedule Details section. You may edit or delete the schedule settings from this screen or re-use the settings of the schedule for a different set of websites.

You may leverage the utility of maintenance schedules and avoid unwanted notifications during a scheduled maintenance. This helps to ensure that you receive alerts only when there is a problem and not otherwise.

We've recently introduced APIs into Site24x7 that lets you pull website uptime & performance data from your account and work with the data in many possible ways. Anyone with programming knowledge can write a program to pull data using the APIs and integrate them into third-party applications. The APIs are Rest style web APIs over HTTP/HTTPS. The data needs to be extracted in XML format. You need to generate an API key to start using the APIs. To generate the key, use the Generate API key option under Account tab inside your account. You may refer this page to know more about Site24x7 APIs. For help on working with the APIs, you can refer our online help documentation. We will be enhancing the APIs as we go along, so feel free to try out the APIs and provide your feedback.

Author: Arun Along with our Enterprise Account release last month, we also added more monitoring locations to our global monitoring network. These locations include Seattle, Chicago & Dallas in the United States, Germany in Europe, Australia, and South Africa in the African continent. This now takes our location count into the double digit figures, its on 12 right now. If you wonder what this means to users, well, it means our users can now monitor the uptime & performance of their business-critical websites from up to 12 different geographical locations, just to make sure their sites are accessible and performing well from across the world. With the addition of new monitoring locations, our monitoring network now has a more global outlook. We have monitoring servers in almost every continent, except for South America. Our South American users, however, need not feel left out. We do have plans to introduce servers in your continent very soon. We've taken care to use only the best hosting providers and hardware in all our monitoring locations. To ensure uninterrupted monitoring from our monitoring servers, please make sure your firewalls allow all requests coming with user agent "Site 24 X 7". More info on our monitoring network here.

Author: Arun We've just released a brand new user package in Site24x7 - the Site24x7 Enterprise Account. This package is ideal for enterprises who want to ensure their customer-facing web sites are meeting business goals. The enterprise account has all the features of our Premium account plus a slew of new features. Here are a few highlights: Website SLA Management This feature lets you define service level agreements and track their compliance. You can now get real uptime and performance stats of your sites and compare with the SLA. The reports section will help you find out if your service providers are meeting your overall expectations. Enterprise-class Reports There are quite a few reports in the new user package which businesses can benefit from. Some of these reports include the Busy Hours Report which gives you performance reports segmented by hour of the day or day of the week, Trend Report to keep a track on website performance trends, Summary Report, Downtime Report, Response Time Report, etc. Here are a few samples:

Summary Report

Response Time Report

Other features/enhancements in the enterprise account include Monitor Group - which lets you group related monitors into separate categories, very useful for service providers. Trace Route upon failure - for isolating the point of network failure. Operations Dashboard - to get an overall picture of the performance of your websites from various geographical locations. An enhanced billing module which includes itemized billing info, printable invoices, etc. Check out this comparison chart to know how the enterprise account differs from the other user packages. To try out the enterprise account, please sign up for a full-fledged, free 15-day trial account. The above-mentioned features are exclusive to the Enterprise account. There are other enhancements too which are common across all accounts. These include an additional 6 monitoring locations (3 in US, 1 each in Europe, Africa & Australia), an improved public stats page, spruced up website design, and more. More on these in a separate post.