Requirements of an Alerting process
Alerting is often equated to notification even or especially within the Monitoring-Community. But an Alerting-System is much more than just a simple notification. Sending an error message is just the first step in an Alerting process. An Alerting-process is finished if
- the problem is solved or
- the problem has been acknowledged by a person in charge.
Relating to these aspects the conditions for a complete Alerting-System include the following:
- Fast transmission of messages to one ore more recipients.
- Dynamic on-call schedules, for reliable and short response times.
- The system is available 24x7 throughout the whole year.
- Alerts triggered by events.
- Alerts triggered manually.
- An acknowledgment feature guarantees the delivered messages.
- Different media for Alert transmission (SMS, EMail, Call, …)
- If an alert has not been acknowledged, (e.g.: transmission failure, absent times, ...) there must be the possibility of Escalations to send alerts to additional contacts or groups per other media.
Wotan Escalation Management
The WOTAN MONITORING Alerting-process guarantees a reliable notification of all incidents to the persons in charge. Besides the alerting of real incidents, avoiding alert storming is another important part of an alerting system. The delayed alerting mechanism of WOTAN MONITORING Escalation Management reduces the number of false alerts drastically.
If WOTAN MONITORING identifies a problem an alert is not sent immediately, but the check will be executed with a higher priority to confirm the problem. In this phase the service is remaining in a so called SoftState because of the temporarily status of the check. Only if all attempts identify a problem, WOTAN MONITORING switches to HardState and the actual escalation process starts.
In HardState Alerts are sent based on the current escalation configuration. While setting up your on-call schedule you can define how an Alert is sent (via SMS, Email or Call...) and how often it should be sent. If none of the recipients acknowledge the Alert and the problem is not solved yet the next escalation level is executed. You can define as many escalation levels as you want. For each step you can define the type of notification (SMS, Email, Call...) and the recipients individually and of course it is possible to repeat the whole process as often as desired.
Acknowledgment
The ability of acknowledging Alerts is a key feature for complete Alerting-Systems. WOTAN MONITORING offers different options to acknowledge Alerts
- Via Wotan Web-Interface.
- Via SMS (-response) to Wotan.
- Via Wotan-Mobile for Android, IPhone, WindowsPhone and all other web-enabled mobilephones.
- Via Response Email.
Configuration
WOTAN MONITORING provides an easy to use Contact directory and a powerful escalation management plugin to set up even complex and dynamic on-call times within minutes. The contact directory, free configurable contact groups and holiday-calendars, absent times and automated consistency checks are keeping your escalation management flexible and reliable.
Wotan Alerting Hardware
Installing WOTAN MONITORING also includes the configuration of a GSM modem. It is capable to send SMS Alerts or individual SMS messages and to receive acknowledgements. If required, it is also possible to start particular processes if a special SMS has been sent to the GSM modem.
Stand alone
WOTAN MONITORING Alerting does work completely independent of the IT Monitoring features. Web-services and agents for Windows, Linux, Unix allows to use this solution in different alerting scenarios.