Just ran into an interesting issue, I got pinged about a feeder outage but everything is running as normal. What’s out is absolutely all air traffic due to the cyclone parked over us, so there’s zero traffic to report.
Would it make sense to add a facility to report situations like this, that an apparent outage of every feeder in a 200km radius isn’t actually an outage but simply the fact that nothing is flying?
And on a related note, are the “longest streak” figures based on a feeder just checking in, or a feeder submitting flight data?
The “no data” watchdog is somewhat by design intended to fire in the “apparently no air traffic!” case, since in most cases it’s more likely to be a hardware fault (water got into the coax, etc) than actually no air traffic.
That said, a way to easily say “hey, this is a planned or anticipated outage, suppress warnings for the next 24/48/96/whatever hours” without having to fully turn off the outage warning would be a nice feature to have.
Hope Gabrielle hasn’t caused you too many problems!
As the guy who fell out of the skyscraper said, so far so good :-).
Having the watchdog is highly useful to notify of outages since the rest of the system is often still running normally so tools like Nagios won’t notify of an issue, but as you say an option to turn off warnings for X hours would be useful, presumably also reducing false positives at the FlightAware end if a whole bunch of feeders suddenly appear to go offline.
