Database servers require regular maintenance and during these periods you may wish to stop Monitor Agents from reporting their findings. During a blackout period rules are not evaluated and notifications are put on hold but Monitor Agents continue to collect data . In this respect blacked-out rules differ from disabled rules; data continues to be collected and stored in the repository.

Blackout periods are enabled by entering the following URL into the address bar of your browser, substituting the appropriate host name, port and server name:

http://localhost:18080/rest?command=blackout »
 &server_name=SuSE:3306&blackout_state=true

If you are unsure of the host name and port to use, check the configuration_report.txt file. Be sure to specify the correct port for the Tomcat server. Specify the server you wish to blackout using the name that appears in the Server Tree, being sure to include a colon and port number as shown in the preceding example.

An HTTP authentication dialog box requesting your Dashboard user name and password will open. Specify the administrator's credentials. The default user name is admin; use the password you specified when you initially logged in to the Dashboard.

You can also blackout a server group by entering the following URL into the address bar of your browser, substituting the appropriate host name, and server group name:

http://localhost:18080/rest?command=blackout »
 &group_name=Finance&blackout_state=true
    

When the HTTP authentication dialog box opens, enter the administrator's credentials.

You can confirm that a server is blacked out by looking at the server name in the Dashboard; the name of a blacked out server is greyed.

To reactivate the blacked-out server or server group, use the appropriate URL and query string, changing the blackout_state=true name/value pair to blackout_state=false. Again, this must be done by a user with administrative privileges.