Best practice for adding a downtime page for SDM 14.1?

[john Wohlgemuth]

What is the best practice for adding a downtime page for SDM 14.1?

 

We are going to be upgrading Service Catalog soon, which requires us to quiesce Service Desk.  We would a downtime page to tell users the system is down, ETA for service restoration etc.

 

SDM:

14.1, Adv Availability

F5 load balancer for user traffic on application servers

IIS 8 running on port 80

10+ application servers

 

I was thinking of using the IIS URL rewrite module to redirect to a maintenance page, but wanted to see what the user groups think.  I would prefer to automate turning on/off the maint page which can be troublesome with the URL rewriter.

 

Thanks,

 

John

[J W]

john.wohlgemuth

 

I would think using the F5 would be the best way since there is a procedure for adding a custom health monitor here:

How to Configure the F5 Load Balancer for CA Service Desk Manager - CA Service Management - 14.1 - CA Technologies Docum… 

 

Then a custom iRule could be created using HTTP::redirect to the Downtime page you create for this purpose.  When SDM comes out of quiesce, then the F5 would return to normal load balancing?

 

J.W.

[Paul Coccimiglio]

John.........

Did J.W's reply the other day help?

[john Wohlgemuth]

HI J_W, Paul,

 

Yes, we internally came to the same conclusion after I posted my question.  I am marking this as answered/correct.

 

Thanks,

 

John W  (the other JW)

[john Wohlgemuth]

To clarify, the Health Monitor provided by CA is used with the F5 to determine if a SDM application server should be marked as  up or down in the pool.  The F5 has a feature (not provided by CA) that if all hosts are marked down then redirect user to maintenance page.

 

Thanks,

 

John