Notifications and alerts

In the final step of Smart Run configuration, you can choose to be notified immediately, or only after a few fails.

Under “Check intervals”, if you select “Only once”, you will be notified if your single-occurrence Smart Run fails. That Smart Run will run once, at the time you specify in the “Next starting time” field.

But you can also choose a periodic runtime, such as “Weekly”, “Daily”, “Hourly”, “Every 15 minutes”, “Every 5 minutes” or even “Every minute”. In this case, setting the next starting time will set the timing for the first Smart Run, and then it will be repeated periodically, as per the interval you set.

Now, if you select a minute by minute run with immediate notification and your server is down for a longer period of time, you might get a crowded inbox. Basically every minute, you will get an email notifying you that your Smart Run has failed. Obviously you don’t want this, so there are a few more options intended to help you sort through the clutter:

• When down, alert after: you can set this to “Instantly”, or after 2, 3 or 5 consecutive fails. Choosing one of the latter options will skip a couple of failures before notifying you. For example, you might have a caching system that makes the first run or first few runs in a new release fail before warming up. Or you may have a couple of minutes of scheduled downtime per day, or while the application reloads. If you don’t want to get any false positives of failure in your email, use this option.
• Resend alert every: you can choose “Never” or once every N number of cycles. This way, Trudon will not bother you with repeated alerts if your website experiences long-term downtime. Everything depends on how you define “long-term”, where 1 cycle is of course the length between each run, as set by you previously.
• Alert when back up: check the box if you want to be alerted when, after a failure, the system went back up. This helps you know whether your application is in fact failing or slow, or if it was just a temporary occurrence and fixed in the meantime.