Advance notification of planned downtime to cloud based instances
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".
This has happened to me too several times whilst I have been either patching after hours or performing other critical operations on Client infrastructure that needed to be completed by a certain deadline, and always without warning, or a timeframe of when the ConnectWise services would be restored again for access and use.