During maintenance periods for database servers, you can stop Monitor Agents from reporting their findings. During such 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.

To enable a blackout period, enter 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

Check the configuration_report.txt file for the host name and port to use. Specify the correct port for the Tomcat server. Specify the server to blackout using the name that appears in the Server Tree, including the colon and port number as shown in the preceding example.

When the HTTP authentication dialog box requesting your Dashboard user name and password opens, specify the credentials for the Manager user. Use the ID and 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.

To confirm that a server is blacked out, check that its name is greyed out in the Dashboard.

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.