Mobile alerting with tracking & escalation for N-able
Why SIGNL4
With N-able, a SolarWinds company, you can centralize and streamline notifications and ticketing for specific systems or services without the need for separate point solutions. It offers powerful 24×7 monitoring and management for scale. It your system has an API you can monitor it with N-able.
SIGNL4 extends N-able and adds mobile alerting and incident response to N-able including push, SMS text, voice calls, escalations and collaboration. The integrated duty planning helps you to schedule your team’s on-call duties and allows you to see how is on duty at any given time.
How it Works
SIGNL4 establishes connection with N-able via webhook or email to enable mobile notification and alerting capabilities for operations teams. When an issue is OK again in N-able the corresponding alert is closed in SIGNL4 accordingly. Specifically the integration helps you with the following.
- Forwards N-able notifications to SIGNL4 for mobile alerting
- Uses Webhook or SMTP email to connect to your SIGNL4 team
- Staff can acknowledge and take ownership for critical events that occur
- Communicate within an alert to address a particular problem
- Alerts are escalated in case of no response
- On-call scheduling to alert the right people at the right time
- Issues marked as resolved in N-able will close the alert in SIGNL4
Scenarios
- 24×7 IT operations
- Anywhere critical incidence response
- On-call scheduling of IT teams
Benefits
- Significantly shorter response times
- Ensures attention for critical alerts and minimizes false alerts
- Clear responsibilities and transparent ownership of IT incidents
- Collaboration with team members when assistance is needed
Issues in N-able are sent the SIGNL4 via HTTP request
Event categorization, routing and automated delivery
Persistent Notifications by push, text and voice call with Tracking, Escalation and Confirmation to Staff on Duty
HOW TO INTEGRATE
In N-able N-central you configure all the devices to be monitored. Here you can also configure your SIGNL4 alerting.
In order to configure SIGNL4 alerting in N-central you go to Administration -> User Management -> Users. Select the respective user and in the user settings go to User Details -> Notification Method. Here add a new notification method “Third Party Integration – HTTP”. Give it a name and as URL enter the following:
https://connect.signl4.com/webhook/{team-secret}?ExtIDParam=DeviceName&ExtStatusParam=QualitativeNewState&ResolvedStatus=Normal
Here, {team-secret} is your SIGNL4 team secret.
That’s it. Now you just need to make sure that your user gets alerted by assigning the user as a recipient to the respective notifications under Configuration -> Monitoring -> Notifications. Attention, you can also test the notifications here but this won’t work (i.e. it will not trigger an alert in SIGNL4) because the data format for the test notifications is not valid.
Alternatively you can also use the email notification method and use your SIGNL4 team’s email address as the email address of the notification method.
ALERT OPTIMIZATION
SIGNL4 can further increase the visibility of alerts through its Signals and Services section. Augmenting the color and icon of alerts will provide more relevant information at a glance without having to open the alert.
Change alert color and override title + text
Override text, colors and titles are triggered by keywords set within the mobile app.