Of course, one expects an alerting solution to be reliable. This is important because a missed alert can have a significant impact on the business. It is about IT uptime, disruptions in production or other critical system conditions. Business processes, production workflows and therefore money, the reputation of the company or even the health of the employees are at stake. But what does reliable alerting actually mean and how is it achieved?
What does reliable alerting mean?
Reliable alerting means that your alerting system will consistently deliver accurate and timely alerts to the right people or teams, so that they can quickly respond to and resolve critical incidents.
The alarms must therefore fulfil the following criteria:
- Dependable: An alert must actually reach the responsible person and generate attention.
- Accurate: Alert messages must be accurate and avoid false positives and negatives. They must reach the persons who are responsible for the corresponding issue at the current time.
- Timely: Alerts must be sent promptly so that (IT) teams can respond to incidents as quickly as possible.
- Clear: Alerts must contain the relevant information needed to understand and resolve an issue.
- Actionable: Alerts should be actionable so that people or teams know what steps they need to take to resolve the issue. Messages that do not require action are not alerts, they are simply information.
- Flexible: The alerting system should be flexible enough to meet the specific needs of the organization. This means that it must be able to create and configure customized alerts and integrate with other (IT) systems.
How is this achieved with SIGNL4?
SIGNL4 is Derdack’s modern SaaS solution for mobile alerting and incident response. It bundles experience from customer scenarios spanning more than two decades. SIGNL4 ensures reliable alerting and thus both ensures that problems are recognized in time and at the same time makes the life of (on-call) teams easier.
How is this achieved exactly?
Dependable alerting:
SIGNL4 uses multiple, independent communication channels, for example push, SMS text or voice calls. The push messages can override the do-not-disturb setting of the smartphone (mute override) and can be set to be particularly loud. Persistent, or recurring, notifications ensure that an alarm is actually noticed – even at night, even in noisy environments. In addition, alerts can be signaled by vibration on the smartphone or on a connected smartwatch or fitness band. If a person actually does not respond to an alarm, it can be escalated to additional people or teams accordingly.
Precise alerting:
No one wants to be woken up at night because a hard drive is 80% full. You can use filter and distribution rules and categories in SIGNL4 to define exactly when, who and about what to alert. A convenient, calendar-based on-call planning ensures that the staff currently responsible always receive the information relevant to them.
Timely alerting:
The seamless integration of SIGNL4 with monitoring tools, IT, production or IoT systems ensures fully automated alerting and thus also ensures that an alert is delivered exactly when a critical incident has been detected.
Clear alerting:
A person must be able to tell at a glance what an alert is about. For this purpose, SIGNL4 offers different types of alert enrichments, for example icons, colors, additional texts, location information or ringing tones.
Flexibility and feasibility:
After the person has identified what an alarm is about, he or she also needs to know what to do to resolve the problem. To do this, SIGNL4 can also enrich alerts with helpful information, such as links to knowledgebase articles or PDF documents, textual information or images about the system in place, or contact information for people to talk to. If help is needed from other team members, they can be contacted directly from the SIGNL4 app, or an entire alert can be manually escalated or forwarded to another team.
Flexibility:
The most reliable alerting system is of no use if it cannot be deployed and integrated quickly and practically. Here SIGNL4 offers not only standard interfaces, such as HTTP (webhook) or email (SMTP), but also numerous ready-made integrations with IT, production or IoT systems. SIGNL4 is ready to use very quickly and can be put into operation independently and without any consulting or training effort.
Conclusion
SIGNL4 is used by numerous companies to ensure smooth operations and increase uptime, for example BASF, Daimler, Berlin Brandenburg Airport (BER) or Scania. In addition to production or IoT, IT operations is a major use case, where 24×7 on-call teams benefit from reliable alerting with SIGNL4.
Would you like to benefit from SIGNL4 as well? You can get started right away. Simply register online here or start directly from your smartphone (Google Play Store or Apple App Store). After registration, you will receive all the necessary information by e-mail.
