Detect Short Service Outages

By default, the monitoring interval for a service is five minutes. You can use the configurable downtime model to detect short service outages, like those caused by automatic network rerouting. The downtime model lets you reduce the monitoring interval to every 30 seconds for 5 minutes when a service outage is detected. If the service comes back online within 5 minutes, a shorter outage is documented.

The image below shows two outages: the first is a service that was detected as being up after 90 seconds. The second has not yet been resolved—​the monitor has not detected an available service, and was not available within the first 5 minutes (polled 10 times, every 30 seconds).

Example downtime model timeline displaying the time between a service being considered unavailable, and an ongoing outage
Figure 1. Example downtime model

The scheduler changed the polling interval back to five minutes.

Example default configuration of the downtime model
<downtime interval="30000" begin="0" end="300000" /><!-- 30s, 0, 5m --> (1)
<downtime interval="300000" begin="300000" end="43200000" /><!-- 5m, 5m, 12h --> (2)
<downtime interval="600000" begin="43200000" end="432000000" /><!-- 10m, 12h, 5d --> (3)
<downtime interval="3600000" begin="432000000" delete="never"/><!-- 1h, 5d --> (4)
1 From 0 seconds after an outage is detected until 5 minutes, set the polling interval to 30 seconds.
2 After 5 minutes of an ongoing outage until 12 hours, set the polling interval to 5 minutes.
3 After 12 hours of an ongoing outage until 5 days, set the polling interval to 10 minutes.
4 After 5 days of an ongoing outage, the service will be polled only once per hour. Services are not deleted during this time.

The last downtime model can have the delete attribute; this lets you influence the service lifecycle. It defines the intended behavior if a service does not come back online after the specified period of time. The following attributes can modify delete:

Value Description

never

Services will never be deleted automatically (default value).

managed

Only managed services will be deleted.

always

Managed and unmanaged services will be deleted.

not set

Assumes a default value of never.