·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.
