Sorting

By default, events are sorted by date and time with the most recent event at the top. This can be reversed or you can sort by any of the column headers:

Type

Events are impacting, excluded, maintenance or non-impacting

Time|Date**

Sort by event start time [default]

Event Details

An alphabetical sort of events

Duration

Show longest duration events first or last

Impacting

Sort by impacting or non-impacting

Filtering

Use the text filter to show specific Event Details and comments. The button is bright blue to indicate a filter is applied to the list. If an incident number is included with a comment, use the text filter to search for it.

Click this icon to see the saved comment

Toggle each check box to show or hide events in the Event list

For a general overview on SLA Now, watch the SLA Now webinar

Users with the permission to Manage maintenance have two ways to exclude an outage from Highlight's availability calculations:

1. Before the event - set up a maintenance window

Refer to the Help & Support Centre for details on creating containers and putting them into maintenance

Purple background areas on the chart show current and past maintenance periods. Watches in maintenance do not send alerts nor change the colour of heat tiles.

2. After the event - exclude an outage

Exclude selected

Check one or more impacting events then add a comment and select this button

Include selected

To reverse exclusions, check those events which have previous been excluded (indicated with ), add a replacing comment and select this button

A comment is required each excluded event. We recommend including an incident number in the comment. This can then be searched for using the text filter in the dialog, in the CSV download or in the Audit log.

Event exclusions are recorded in the Audit Log against the watch with details of which user made the change, any comment and when.

Events which have been excluded have the following characteristics:

the non-impacting indicator

Duration

the duration of the event will be faded, for example 4h 42m

and either

the maintenance icon which shows "Event occurred whilst watch in maintenance" on hover

or

the grey excluded icon with

the indicator which displays the comment when clicked

In the CSV download, events which have been excluded show:

Type

excluded

Impacting

no

Impacting Duration

00:00

Comment

as entered by the user who excluded the event

The number of exclusions made and adjusted availability show in the SLA Compliance report with a red background if the availability figure is less than the SLA target.

The following totals for the time period (day, week or month) selected are shown. These are not affected by any Event list filter:

• Total events:

  a count and cumulative duration of all events in the selected time period including events which occurred during a maintenance window for this watch.

• Impacting events:

  a count and cumulative duration of the non-excluded impacting events in the selected time period. The duration is used to calculate Adjusted availability.

• Operational availability:

  the percentage of time this watch was available in the time period; this will not include time before the device was activated nor outages during maintenance.

• Adjusted availability:

  the availability figure which is calculated using non-excluded impacting events. If no events are manually excluded, operational and impacting availability figures match.

Operational and adjusted availability correspond to the figures shown in the SLA Compliance report for the same period.

Affects the Stability metric [CPU Util affects the Load metric, Discards and Line Errors affect the Health metric]

This line shows how available your connection has been. Availability is worked out as a percentage of the day, week or month that the watch was monitored. Several issues will cause outages which are shown as coloured blips on this line and decrease the availability percentage.

Note: Mustard and blue blips can be custom configured to be included in Total outages or not. This is set by the service provider at a folder level and inherited by subfolders unless overridden. The duration will be shown in grey text to indicate it is excluded from the total outages figure and does not affect Operational availability.

The entries you may see are summarised in this table with full details below:

1. Green: Transient or brief outage

Overview

Shown as a green blip, these are brief outages which indicate the link being monitored went down and up very briefly between the times Highlight polled it. Highlight can tell this has happened because the device timestamps the last interface change, so if the state changed between consecutive successful polls there must have been a brief outage.

For example, if this link state timestamp had increased between the check at 00:00 and the check at 00:03, we know the line was briefly down between those times, even though it looked healthy both times we checked it.

Cause

For a green blip to be drawn, the line must be down for less than the polling period. The outage may have lasted for a few seconds, a minute or more. When the line comes back up, it will take a short time for routing to settle down, the router to start passing packets again, then for any connections using it to timeout and retry, so the effective outage will be longer. Highlight counts each transient outage as one minute of downtime, which is a sensible estimate.

2. Mustard: Ongoing connectivity problems

When Highlight loses contact with the device it is monitoring, we treat the outage as an ongoing issue shown by a mustard blip. Only once Highlight reconnects with the device can we check the last change timestamp for the monitored interface, which determines if the link went down whilst we were out of touch with it (the mustard colour changes to red 'Circuit reported as down'); or the link did not go down (the mustard colour changes to blue 'Device not contactable') - see next point 3.

A mustard blip will also be shown if Highlight is set to monitor an unknown interface.

3. Blue: No data : device not contactable

If the last change timestamp for the monitored interface hasn't changed when connection is re-established after connectivity problems, Highlight knows that the line has been up all the time and we simply lost contact because of a problem elsewhere on the network. Highlight marks these events by turning mustard blips to blue with the comment 'No data : Device not contactable.' There was no outage detected by the device, although it was not reachable from the Highlight platform.
The availability percentage is not decreased unless the folder option to treat blue as an outage is set to Yes.

A blue blip will also be shown if Highlight was previously set to monitor an unknown interface; or if the device does not support the "last change" parameter.

4. Black: Device restarted

This is where the monitored device has been powered off/on or restarted and is shown by a black blip. If the link itself was down before the device was restarted you will see red blips with the last blip being black. For more details see point 6 below (Red: Circuit reported as down).

5. Turquoise: Device configuration changed

This indicates a change in the configuration of the monitored device itself and is shown as a turquoise blip.

6. Red: Circuit reported as down

This is where we regain contact with the device after an outage and establish that the monitored link definitely went down. The mustard blips will turn red. Like other red issues, this counts as a formal outage on your watch, shown by a red blip and the comment 'Circuit reported as down.' The availability percentage for that watch will be decreased.

7. Deep Red: Circuit taken out of service

If the monitored link has been shut down deliberately on the device, the comment will be 'Circuit taken out of service.'

8. Bright Blue: Unknown event type

If the event type cannot be determined, the comment will be 'Unknown event type'