We're excited to announce a number of updates to CheckCentral!

We've added the ability to collapse groups on your dashboard to make it easier to see only the information you need to see. The groups you collapse will be remembered whenever or wherever you login to CheckCentral!

Repeated Failure Notifications

New options for failure notifications give you more control over when you are alerted about the status of your checks. A check with a configured "failure notification grace period" will wait to send alerts until the specified time has elapsed. If the check returns to success before the alert is sent, it will be canceled.

The repeated failure option provides several options to control failure notifications when a Check receives multiple consecutive failures:

• Notify on every failure: this will send an alert every time a failure message is processed by CheckCentral
• Notify on first failure: this will only send an alert for the first of any consecutive failure messages
• Notify on every failure after N consecutive failures: this will send alerts for every failure message after the limit is reached
• Notify on every N consecutive failures: this will send alerts every time the specified number of failures are processed in a row, e.g. with a setting of "3", you would receive alerts for every 3rd, 6th, 9th failure, and so on

Newly Created Check Activity

As well, newly created checks will now have an initial starting activity (set to Success). This will allow the check to become marked overdue once the specified interval has elapsed. To leave the check in a neutral state that will not become overdue until a message has been received, you can delete that created activity.

In addition to these notification updates, we have also made several UI improvements and fixes, including the text for overdue check alerts and organization logos on PDF reports. If you have feedback or question about any of these updates, or anything else, please let us know!

We're excited to announce the new "setCheckStatus" endpoint for the CheckCentral API! This is the first writable endpoint for the API. SetCheckStatus allows authenticated requests to update the status of a specific check. As well, the request can include an associated message, and optionally send alert notifications for the check as well.

Only API tokens that are configured with Read/Write access will be able to make requests to this endpoint. Existing API tokens are set as "Read Only", with all the same permissions they currently have. You can modify a token's access level on your organization's API token management page, available under the "Organization" menu for organization administrators.

Stats CSV Export

As well as the API update, we've also included the option for CSV export on your organization's stats page. Any search on the stats page can be saved as a CSV report by clicking the "Save CSV" button.

If you have any feedback, suggestions, or questions about the API or CheckCentral in general, please let us know!

We're happy to announce that we have expanded the options for generating PDF reports! PDFs for individual checks can now be generated with activity history for a custom date range, and to cap the displayed history to a configured limit.

As well, you can now generate PDF reports from the Organization Stats page. To help with creating reports, the stats page also provides the option to only display stats for a specific check group. Please let us know if you have any feedback!

In addition, we have released an update to iOS notifications to improve performance and reliability.

We're excited to announce that CheckCentral now has a read-only API available, so that you can pull Check and Issue details into your own custom applications!

To get started, select the API option from the Organization menu when you're on your CheckCentral page. On this page, you can add API tokens that are used when accessing the API from your scripts. Treat the tokens as you would your password!

After adding a token, you can click the Documentation link to view the available API endpoints, and if you click one of the endpoints, you can test it out right in your browser. The API calls return JSON data that you can use in your programming/scripting language of choice.

Here's a sample PowerShell script that gets the details for the Checks in a specific Check Group, and dumps them to a formatted HTML file: CC-API-GetCheckDetailsForSpecificGroup.ps1

If you need any help with the new API or have any questions, please contact us and we'll help you get up and running.

We're very excited to announce some changes to our CheckCentral subscription plans that are rolling out today. We're doing away with the old tiered plans, and moving to a system where you only pay for the checks you need, as you need them. Getting started with CheckCentral has never been easier or more affordable!

Starting today, you'll be able to add or remove checks in groups of 10, with each group costing $5. In addition, all paying customers get access to all of our Enterprise features, including unlimited users, API access, and custom dashboards! We’re also removing the limit on the number of groups that can be configured. Our discounts for pre-paying quarterly or yearly are still available as well.

For our existing customers, you will be grandfathered in at your current subscription rate, and you can easily change the amount of checks on your account via the Subscription page.

If you have any questions or comments about these changes, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.

I'm an existing customer. How do I make changes to my check allotment?

After logging in to your CheckCentral organization, click the Subscription link in the top menu. At the top of the Enterprise plan column, there's a slider you can drag left or right to decrease or increase the number of checks you're paying for. The updated monthly subscription cost will be displayed immediately.

I'm a new customer. How many checks do I get during the 60-day free trial?

As many as you like! On the Subscription page, you can adjust the slider to increase or decrease the number of checks at any time during your trial.

What do I do if I'm not sure about these new plans?

Contact us with any questions that you have and we'll be glad to help out!

Save the attached file (checkReplication.ps1) to a directory on the Active Directory server you'd like to monitor. You'll need to schedule it using Task Scheduler. If you haven't changed the execution policy on that server yet, you can do so by opening PowerShell and entering the following:

Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted

In Task Scheduler, create a new basic task.

• Name can be 'Check Replication' or something similar
• Trigger can be daily (you can tweak that later if you'd like to check more frequently)
• Action is going to be 'Start a program'
• Program is powershell.exe
• Argument is -File "C:\scripts\checkReplication.ps1" (update with the actual location you saved the PowerShell script).

Ok! Next step is creating the check in CheckCentral. Add a new check and use the following settings:

• Frequency: scheduled
• Schedule Type: regular interval
• Emails are expected: every 24 hours
• Set as failed when an email is late: after 90 minutes

Copy the email address that is displayed here and update the checkReplication.ps1 script with it (it's the $msgAddress variable)

• Default Status: Failure
• Success Rule: check the Condense Whitespace box, and Body Text - Complex Match - "0 / 5"{4}

Complex matches are pretty powerful, and in this instance we're telling CheckCentral to look at the output of the command and to count how many times "0 / 5" shows up, and to only mark the check as successful if that string appears exactly 4 times. Now, this is just for two Active Directory servers. If you have more in your environment, just open up a command prompt on an Active Directory server and run repadmin.exe /replsummary and have a look at the output. When I run this, I want to make sure there are 0 / 5 errors for each of the entries listed. In this particular environment, that's 4 times, and that's where the {4} comes from above. If you have more servers, that number is going to be higher, so just enter that in instead.

Save your check, and try running your scheduled task. If all is well, an email should show up under Recent Activity, and hopefully the dot is green!