·What Is Beacon? #
Beacon (Broadcast Engine for Announcing Change Operations & Notifications) is the official IT communication and change management portal for the institution. It serves as the authoritative source for:
- Service Status — real-time health of core IT services
- Maintenance — upcoming and past maintenance windows
- Changes — formal change records for infrastructure modifications
- Announcements — general IT news and upcoming events
- Documentation — how-to guides and IT policy articles
- Playbooks — operational runbooks for IT staff
- Endpoints — inventory and status of monitored systems
How to Use This Portal #
Checking Service Status #
The Status section lists current operational health for all monitored services. Each entry shows the service name and a colour-coded status badge:
| Badge | Meaning |
|---|---|
| 🟢 Online | Fully operational |
| 🟡 Degraded | Reduced performance or partial outage |
| 🔴 Offline | Service unavailable |
Tracking Planned Maintenance #
The Maintenance section and its calendar view show all upcoming scheduled maintenance windows. Subscribe to the feed or bookmark this page to stay informed.
Following Change Records #
The Changes section documents every formal change to production infrastructure, including business justification, scope, rollback plans, and approval status.
Subscribing to Updates #
You can subscribe to section-specific RSS/Atom feeds to receive updates in your feed reader. Feed links are available at the bottom of each section’s listing page.
How Content Reaches This Portal #
IT staff submit content through the Sveltia CMS admin interface (/admin/). All submissions are reviewed, version-controlled in Git, and published automatically via a CI/CD pipeline. This means every change to this site is tracked and auditable.
Feedback #
If you notice an error or have a suggestion for this portal, please open a ticket at it.example.edu/support and select Beacon Portal Feedback as the category.
