Do-Not-Contact Periods

I have a number of servers and/or services that "go down" during the  
night for backups and other maintenance, but I obviously don't want  
to get paged during those times. I actually "spawn" a specific script  
to send the page, so I could do some parsing to ignore pages for  
certain servers & services during their respective maintenance  
periods, but that's a whole bunch of work in a script that it doesn't  
belong in (meaning more work to modify my Sysmon config as well).

I propose the following configuration options (where "dnc" stands for  
"do not contact" and "time" would be a 24-hour "HH:MM" string):

	dnc-begin [ time ]
	dnc-end [ time ]

In terms of functionality, the up/down status of an object would not  
be tested (just as if the object it depended on were down) and,  
naturally, no "contact" or "spawn" configuration options would be  
acted upon during that time period. This way, if a server didn't come  
back up at the end of the scheduled maintenance period, one would  
still get paged, but no testing/paging would occur during the  
maintenance period.

Whether or not the uptime would be affected is open for discussion.  
I'd argue it should affect uptime, but then you'd have to still test  
the object, but just not contact/spawn.

How much work would this be to implement, realistically? If you can  
point me in the right direction (e.g. where to add the new config  
options and which function does the contact/spawn then I'll gladly  
implement it myself and send you the diffs (even if I have to do it  
off-the-clock).

BTW - Another related option that might be useful would be a  
"timezone [ string ]" option for those of us that have servers in  
different time zones. Obviously less important.

Sincerely,

Morgan Aldridge
--
[email protected]
http://www.makkintosshu.com/