On friday we released a new feature – custom timeouts! This is particularly useful on http type monitors and can be used to reduce ‘false alarms’ caused by a slow server response rather than a fully offline/unreachable server or site.
In many cases you may be monitoring a server which is very loaded or on a slow connection or just at certain times of the day slows down either due to visitor traffic patterns or running scheduled tasks. Since you are already aware of this status you don’t want to be getting alerts all the time saying your server is down.. so now you can simply define a longer timeout (the system wide default is 5 seconds) and this should eliminate such alerts in all but the most extreme cases.
To set your timeout just visit your settings page and enter any number between 1 and 20 seconds. This setting applies to all monitors in your account. To decide what timeout is best for your case just look at the response time charts for your monitors over the last 30 days and then choose a time slightly above the typical response times you see there.
Let us know if you have any questions or suggestions.
Tags: featurefriday
