How the Downtime Simulator works

The Downtime Simulator uses Timing and Notification Control parameters to control the failure and alerting process for each monitor.

The following example uses the Monitor Timing and Notification Control parameters.

The following table provides an example of the alerting process. Three failed tests must accumulate before each alert is sent. The Maximum Alerts to Send value is set to 3.

In the Time values column, notice that the interval between each test is a combination of the Delay Between Tests While: UP value of the monitor and the Average Test Duration value of the simulator. In this example, the value is 10 seconds.

In the Downtime Simulator Time column, look at the Timing parameters for the monitor. In this example, we used the default setting of 300 seconds for each Monitor State, but the time of each test increments by 310 seconds (five minutes ten seconds). This is explained using the following formula:

10-second Average Test Duration + 300-second Delay Between Tests

The Average Test Duration is used to override the Maximum Test Duration timing parameter.

In a real-world scenario, the numbers in the Time column would be much more variable. Variables such as the monitor type, network topology, network load, hardware, carrier, and latencies all affect the time it takes to perform tests. Some tests may return values in a few hundred milliseconds, while others may not return values for several seconds.