I trialled a great subscription service whilst I was out of the office over the Christmas holidays called Website pulse. This lets you set up virtually any number of different SMS or email alert notifications in the event that a website that you have 'targeted' becomes unavailable.
The system lets you specify how often it 'pings' a target website and you can set it to increase the frequency of pings if a website has gone down. It also provides notification when a website is restored as well as daily logs and reports of duration outage.
Pricing is based on a number of factors such as how many sites you monitor and how often you are text once a fault is detected but best of all it gives you a months free trial. One of their support team even called me to make sure I had set it up as I wanted and didn't have any questions.
Whilst I'm sure there are other systems out there websitepulse seemed to do what it says on the tin and would be worth thinking about if you have a role that relies on access to web-based services or sites.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Conficker worm and business continuity
The last week has illustrated some challenges around business continuity and corporate networks and the increasing need for emergency managers to be familiar with the basics of their organisations IT services
The Ministry of Health has been dealing with the Conficker worm that is now spreading rapidly across the world and is estimated to have affected over 6.5million windows computers in the last 4 days. Whilst things are coming back to normal, some of the control measures such as shutting down web based services in and out of the Ministry has obviously had a significant impact.
With delays last year around implementing the mirrored fallback site for the emergency management information system, the production server had to be taken down and we informed the sector and put in place other arrangements to manage an emergency until the production server was restored.
Restrictions continue on internet access, so as well as delays in updating this blog, we have had to think about access to computers outside the corporate environment so that we can access data on sites such as the World Health Organisation.
With the outbreak affecting more and more PC's now is the time to buy your friend in the IT department another coffee, confirm everything is up to date and think about how you would be able to maintain your critical communication links, inform your public and stakeholders and prioritise your system restoration.
Finally a big thanks to everyone who has worked so hard in the information directorate, especially those I always seem to talk to in desktop support and the application & server team for getting production restored so quickly.
The Ministry of Health has been dealing with the Conficker worm that is now spreading rapidly across the world and is estimated to have affected over 6.5million windows computers in the last 4 days. Whilst things are coming back to normal, some of the control measures such as shutting down web based services in and out of the Ministry has obviously had a significant impact.
With delays last year around implementing the mirrored fallback site for the emergency management information system, the production server had to be taken down and we informed the sector and put in place other arrangements to manage an emergency until the production server was restored.
Restrictions continue on internet access, so as well as delays in updating this blog, we have had to think about access to computers outside the corporate environment so that we can access data on sites such as the World Health Organisation.
With the outbreak affecting more and more PC's now is the time to buy your friend in the IT department another coffee, confirm everything is up to date and think about how you would be able to maintain your critical communication links, inform your public and stakeholders and prioritise your system restoration.
Finally a big thanks to everyone who has worked so hard in the information directorate, especially those I always seem to talk to in desktop support and the application & server team for getting production restored so quickly.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
New Link shows all WebEOC users logged in
Jeremy has created a great function in response to the requests in Superuser training sessions to see who is logged in.Simply click on WebEOC Session List under the Links menu to open a webpage showing Users and which Incident they are logged into (Remember Position is used to record the short code for your agency, Username is actually the generic CIMS position in your EOC).
It also shows any additional log-in information that they have entered, this is why it is important to add your own name and details on that log-in page. It is also good practice to log-off when you change shift so that the next user can update their details.
The Session List can also be viewed without having to log into WebEOC. Simply view http://moheoc.moh.govt.nz/sessionlist/
Monday, January 5, 2009
WebEOC Blog up and running
Even after two and a half years in NZ I am still not used to a long break at Christmas so it is nice to be back in the office with most people still away for a week or two and able to get some outstanding work done.
One of these pieces of work was the creation of a blog to update the health emergency management community around changes to WebEOC and Emergeo. Boards and links on the control panel are always being refined following user comments in exercises or real incidents and many of these changes are small or subtle refinements that do not necessarily warrant posting to the Emergency Management part of the Ministry of Health website.
Blogging is also an ideal means of contacting the thousands of potential users across the sector. Why thousands? Well there are over 900 generic CIMS (Coordinated Incident Management System) based positions across nearly 60 agencies and I know many emergency managers have 3 or 4 people trained for each role,
It's also a bit more informal and an opportunity to keep anyone interested up to date with the more routine work in progress on the system.
In order to provide some initial content I have added some of the most recent changes and events over the last 6 months.
One of these pieces of work was the creation of a blog to update the health emergency management community around changes to WebEOC and Emergeo. Boards and links on the control panel are always being refined following user comments in exercises or real incidents and many of these changes are small or subtle refinements that do not necessarily warrant posting to the Emergency Management part of the Ministry of Health website.
Blogging is also an ideal means of contacting the thousands of potential users across the sector. Why thousands? Well there are over 900 generic CIMS (Coordinated Incident Management System) based positions across nearly 60 agencies and I know many emergency managers have 3 or 4 people trained for each role,
It's also a bit more informal and an opportunity to keep anyone interested up to date with the more routine work in progress on the system.
In order to provide some initial content I have added some of the most recent changes and events over the last 6 months.
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