We have just introduced a new monitoring feature called “Notification Delay,” which allows you to adjust how long a Monitor must be down before generating a problem alert.

Most of our monitors are high priority–we are notified immediately if there is a problem. However, we have a few that are less important like batch jobs and non-critical systems. Notification is only necessary if they have been down for a longer period of time (maybe 30 minutes or an hour). Another example is automatic maintenance jobs over the weekend that briefly shut down some services and notification is only necessary if something has been down longer than expected.

You can set the delay on the monitor details screen which you can get to from the Monitor Tree, your Dashboard, or your main Monitors list. For your convenience we have put a link directly to the details in all alert emails.

The default value is to Send Immediately. You can choose values of 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1, 2 or 4 hours of sensitivity.

Please note, notification delay is only applicable to MxToolBox “transactional” monitors such as Mailflow, SMTP, TCP, HTTP, and HTTPS. There is not a notification delay setting on Blacklist monitors. To adjust blacklist notification frequencies, contact support to activate the Summary Alert Message (SAM) feature that generates alert reports containing all of your monitors that are in transition in one nicely formatted email message.

Notification Delay is available now to all of our paid users. If you’ve thought about upgrading your free account, now is the time!