Advance notification of planned downtime to cloud based instances
I recently had an incident where I was connected to a remote machine using ConnectWise Control, performing a critical operation which was being observed by customer representatives at the remote location and at around 2:26am the connection to the guest machine was abruptly lost and the web interface for the instance failed to load/reported an error. It took 10-15 minutes for me to be able to re-establish my connection to the guest machine. A few hours later I found that I had received an email at 2:26am informing me of the IP address change - if this had been sent 24 hours in advance detailing when the operation was going to take place and how long the instance would be unavailable for then it might have been useful and actionable. Not being aware that this planned maintenance operation that required the CW Control cloud based instance to be unavailable caused issues that could have been easily avoided had advanced notice of the planed downtime been provided.
I would like to suggest a CW Control feature where by advance notification of planned downtime can be provided to customers.
Obviously this is just for "planned downtime". No rational person can expect advanced notification for "unplanned downtime".
I would like to suggest a CW Control feature where by advance notification of planned downtime can be provided to customers.
The notification could be:
- An email sent to the address users configured on the instance.
- A banner notification on the web interface, similar to that display when guest machines need to be updated, which could be dismissed (and therefore the notification of that downtime no longer shown) on a per user basis.
Either or both of these could be implemented for the feature, configuration via the admin page or per-user preference as to if the banner and/or email should be sent to a user and the timeframe in advance of the downtime that the notification would be provided. The configuration would allow full spectrum coverage from customers that are not bothered about planned downtime that will switch off all notifications for all users, through customers that only want a single user to be informed, to customers that want all users to know about planned downtime.
Obviously this is just for "planned downtime". No rational person can expect advanced notification for "unplanned downtime".
+1
I work nights and every time they go down for maintenance or version upgrades I'm always in the middle of something important.
I understand the overnight hours make the most sense for maintenance but a heads up of at least 24 hours for planned maintenance would allow me to plan around it.