Feature request – beep/play sound on ping status change

[DJ]

Would it be possible to add a feature that either beeps or plays a sound (predefined or user-defined) when the ping status (up/down) of a host changes? Ideally this would be a row-level attribute, but even a global setting would be OK.

When patching systems, it can be very nice to be alerted when a system goes down and/or comes up.

Thanks for your time!

[doug]

DJ – We will consider this for a future build.

You’re actually the only person to ever request such a feature, and I must admit that I’m having trouble seeing the value. If you have a hundred (or more) servers installing updates and rebooting, does it really help to hear 200 audio sounds over the course of the couple minutes that all these servers are changing states from online to offline and offline back to online? Perhaps you could explain in a bit more detail how you envision this to be helpful or valuable?

Thanks,

Doug

[DJ]

Well, you wouldn’t be the first person to question my suggestions… 🙂

I don’t envision this being helpful when patching large batches of systems. However, I have encountered two situations lately where I think this could be useful.

First, if I am patching a group of computers and have one or two that I know are slow to complete, I could setup an alert to notify me when those computers go down or, preferably, when they come back up. While I could sit and watch for the blue status indicator to appear, if I am working on other tasks and/or have the BatchPatch window minimized or behind other windows it would be nice to be “actively” alerted.

Second, I have a handful of people using laptops that seem to have difficulty (ahem) remembering how to patch their systems properly. It would be great if I could have a tab in BatchPatch containing those machines (again, running in the background) that would alert me when those machines are up/pingable so that I could check the machine’s patch status and contact the owner quickly instead of waiting until mid-morning and trying to find a time to reboot their machine during the day.

Thanks for your consideration and all the work you put into BatchPatch–it’s a great program!

[doug]

Thanks, DJ. This makes a lot of sense. I’ll see what we can do to add something like this in a future build.

In the meantime, one possible solution for situation number 2 that you described would be to use BatchPatch to schedule a task for a given computer and choose the option to “run task immediately upon detecting computer online.” You could have the task send you an email to let you know that the machine is online.

-Doug

[doug]

These features have been added in the 2014.5.2 build.

-Doug

[Author]

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