Sometimes you need to query an existing mailbox for specific emails instead of forwarding emails directly to your SIGNL4 team email address. This example uses Zapier to query a Gmail mail account. New emails with specific content then trigger alert notifications through SIGNL4. Zapier is great workflow tool and provides integrations with almost any mailbox type.
Business-to-business, also known as B2B, has not always been recognized as the glamorous side of marketing and sales no matter what industry. This is even more evident when discussing the sale of software and enterprise applications. Previously, this was a rather stale environment, however, in today’s strong-buyer scenario, things have begun to change. Due to the abundance
Machines, pumps, valves, fire alert systems, temperature sensors, smoke detectors, etc. often do not offer IT integration. Instead, they provide simple analog cables to interface with dry contacts. Monitoring these I/O states and detecting abnormal behavior or malfunctions a common scenario in industrial IoT. Operations teams in charge of business and operational continuity need to know
Imagine being a child on a playground. You see other children playing tag, climbing, sliding, laughing… and you are digging in the sandbox alone. You are content, but you question if this is the best way to go about your day. Sure, you can go play on the swings for a solid 20 minutes, but that
In a previous article we’ve shown how to send alerts to SIGNL4 from Amazon Alexa. It is also possible to do the same using the Google Assistant, either on your mobile device or using your Google Home speaker. Setting it up is easy if you are tech-savvy. You need an Android phone with the Google Assistant,
The Internet of Things (IoT) has become an exciting area of work. Businesses are rapidly adapting various IoT products whether they realize it or not. Thanks to the booming development of Internet of Things, users across industries can now easily monitor, trigger, and maintain processes and equipment with a brilliant software and strong networks. The infrastructural pieces
*This article was first published on Microsoft’s Manufacturing Industry Blog on July 17, 2018. The fourth industrial revolution, Industry 4.0, is happening today. Recent progress in manufacturing automation requires fewer individuals on a shop floor to do manual work with and at machines. However, those people are now required to respond faster and more effectively
The development and rise of cool, tiny and smart devices of all shapes and functions is the foundation of the Internet of Things (IoT). Many of these mechanisms shared below are relatively small in size, but do not let that fool you. These are powerful products that have been endorsed by many. Today, I will introduce
We live in an age of hyper-connectedness. Specific-function devices are now able to relay information to networks in real-time with ease. To put it simply, we live among the Internet of Things (IoT). In this article, we will dive into what IoT is, where it is headed, and what that means for consumers and businesses in
Field service management (FSM) is the business-official way of mentioning all the operational and administrative work that goes into on-location service delivery. In other words, FSM is the juggling act that involves everything from accounting and customer relationship management (CRM) to service dispatching and enterprise resource planning (ERP). One can find FSM in many industries like IT,
On our smart phones, we receive an abundance of personal and business push notifications every day. Business and business-critical push notifications are meant to be read, ideally acknowledged, and acted on in an attentive manner. The problem is that people cannot always be contacted effectively with a simple push notification. Today I am going to
June 2018 update brings two cool features: Acknowledgement of alerts by all team members (on duty) Sending of alerts to the team from a Web Browser Happy exploring! Group alerting with multiple acknowledgements There are multiple models of how many people are required to acknowledge a critical alert. Typical for IT and other areas of maintenance and
The app-based alerting service SIGNL4, enables you to send alerts from your corporate infrastructure via e-mail or webhook. Your team will then receive the notifications by push, SMS or phone call. But what if the Internet connection is no longer available and you cannot transmit the alerts to SIGNL4? Below we describe a convenient method
In the digital age, it is extremely helpful to have Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools in place to maximize team productivity. SaaS tools are great because they take essential work tasks, and slim them down into user-friendly web and mobile applications. Below I have recommended five SaaS tools available online. I selected these as they are applicable
SIGNL4 offers easy-to-use interfaces for triggering notifications, e.g. email and Webhook. In some scenarios you might want to send signals manually from a Web portal. Google Forms is one option to add this feature to SIGNL4. The following steps show you how to setup a simple Web form for manually sending signals to your SIGNL4
We are incredibly proud to announce the May 2018 update, which adds the following new features to SIGNL4: Persistent alert notifications via text and voice call In-app triggered alerts transmit current geographic location Alerts can be enriched with maps and geolocation Intelligent notification flood protection algorithm (notification suppression) Extended MDM support (MobileIron) for App Config
SIGNL4 offers a powerful API to extend functionality and to embed it seamlessly into other applications and services. Using the API you can for instance build custom ‘who is on duty’ dashboards or trigger actions in case an alert has been acknowledged in the SIGNL4 mobile app. You can also build a web page to
The April 2018 update adds the following new features to SIGNL4: New methods and method enhancements for the REST API and webhook A new duty & shift length of 14 days Availability in new countries Happy exploring! Outbound webhooks: Correlate alert-status changes and the original event We have addressed requests for better correlation of alert-triggering
When a critical problem needs attention, advice from peers and experts is often valuable. While a phone call might be the fastest way to communicate, there can be circumstances where it doesn’t work or isn’t appropriate. That is why we built a chat feature into SIGNL4. Mobile ChatOps in SIGNL4 The built-in mobile chat is
The problem with push notifications as an alarm channel is that they don’t really alert you when the phone is set to “Do not disturb”. The mobile phone will vibrate only, if at all. Important alarms will be missed. That might turn into a true disaster for important alerts! So what’s the alternative? You can
The February 2018 update adds the following new features to SIGNL4: CSV alert protocols, e.g. for Excel import and analytics Management of linked third-party applications, e. g. Alexa Skill CSV audit trail log of all alarms and notifications With the help of the CSV audit trail protocols, it is now possible to evaluate how many
Alarms in your SIGNL4 team can also be created manually from a Slack conversation. This is basically quite simple and consists of the following digital assets: a custom Slack App for SIGNL4, which you create in your own Slack-Team the Slack EventsAPI (https://api.slack.com/events-api). This API forwards desired messages/information from Slack to a remote HTTP endpoint
We sometimes live in a paradoxical world. Our cars, or those that will soon be automatically brought to us via an Alexa voice command, drive us e. g. independently to the doctor or in front of a furniture store. Once there, however, it is just not possible to read in the chip card for registration
Managers and executives are always interested in current company data and KPIs (“key performance indicators”). This includes information about the current monthly and annual turnover. But also promising customer requests (A leads) that may require the collaboration of several departments. And of course also critical technical incidents at customers who need a quick solution to ensure
With Amazon Alexa, the Internet giant, Amazon, has quickly established itself as a leading company in the field of digital assistants with speech recognition. We here at Derdack SIGNL4 believe that speech recognition will play an enormously important role in the near future in all areas of life and business. In connection with mobile alarming,
Modern alerting systems based on mobile apps can achieve significant efficiency gains in healthcare and reduce the working pressure on nursing staff. Here we describe how such a solution is used for patient and bedside monitoring. Challenges in patient bedside monitoring in hospitals In a hospital, there is an existing patient monitoring system (bedside monitoring system,
Utilities companies represent a particular challenge for modern alarm solutions complementing SCADA systems. Due to the decentralised distribution of installations and plants in rural and urban areas, operation, maintenance and repair are already associated with considerable technical, logistical and personnel expenditure. Several factors that are negligible in centralized scenarios must be taken into account. Location, accessibility,
Urgent breakdown maintenance calls are a common scenario on a shop floor, e.g. in manufacturing or logistics. Response is a critical matter as equipment breakdowns bring your operations to a grinding halt. When a machine breaks down or malfunctions, a maintenance engineer on duty or on call needs to be notified, usually through the machine showing blinking red light or manually
If you are using AWS CloudWatch for monitoring your AWS assets 24/7, an effective routing of alarms to IT personnel during after-business-hours is essential for a swift handling of any problems and incidents occurring any given time of the day. This post explains how to route AWS CloudWatch alarms with SIGNL4 to improve your after hour incident response while using
How can you quickly send an urgent alert to a response team from your desktop browser? Here is a pretty slick example for Google Chrome implemented with zapier and SIGNL4. SIGNL4 is for sending persistent mobile alerts to your response team. It provides for simple duty management (duty check-in & check-out) and routes alerts from other
Nowadays most IT admins will get an email if their website monitoring solution detects a health issue or a website down. Maybe your entire team gets an email. But how likely are you to check your inbox every minute. And don’t you want share on-call duty across your team members? You simply don’t want to have everybody
Are you using Azure Application Insights for health monitoring of your website or web app? If so, I bet you have alerts setup to get notified in case of service health issues. By default, you or your whole team will get an email. But how do you know who took ownership. And in case of urgent issues, how do
SIGNL4 provides a convenient, out-of-the-box solution to send mobile SCOM alerts to your ops teams. With SIGNL4 you can build subject expert teams and send SCOM alerts to team members on duty. With the SIGNL4 mobile app, teams easily check-in and check-out to receive SCOM alerts when they are on call. The mobile app will
Microsoft Flow is a great intuitive workflow and process automation app. It provides a simplified graphic workflow orchestration approach. One of the most used actions in flows is sending or forwarding notifications upon events in your business process. Common notification channels email and mobile push through the Microsoft’ Notification connector. If you need to notify your team and
With SIGNL4, ServiceNow is complemented with intelligent mobile alert notifications for IT ops teams. Alerts will be routed to the right person who is on call/on duty. Team members will be notified persistently until acknowledgement. Incident ownership can be seen and tracked throughout the team. This significantly accelerates the response to critical incidents that need swift attention
IoT platforms such as Cumulocity by Software AG are a crucial part in a proper “Industry 4.0” implementation. The Deutsche Telekom AG is using Cumulocity for their new IoT products like “Predictive Maintenance” and the “Cloud der Dinge Starterkit”. They are used to connect and organize shop floor machines via the Internet for capturing their data
The key to efficient devops procedures lies in responsiveness, clear responsibility and incident ownership. Alerts and notifications are effective tools to increase these key factors. In today’s agile environments with a demanding customer landscape, a rapid response is essential. Alert notifications, ideally of mobile nature, represent a great tool for continuous attention and swift response. Communication
SIGNL4 provides a simple way to use mobile push notification to effectively communicate with closed client and customer communities. It opens an excellent channel in B2B communication. Generally, mobile push is an effective mean of communication. Attention level is high and the message-open rate is significantly great than what email yields. For particularly important B2B-related information, this
When I started with my first Raspberry mini computer, I selected Windows 10 IoT Core as the operating system. This allowed for using Visual Studio and C#. It is not that difficult to call a webhook from your C# code, though a couple of pitfalls await you when your build your Raspberry project (I connected a
Responding to OMS alerts occuring in after-hours can be challenging with Microsoft’s native mobile app, because: People forget to turn off notifications when their duty has ended, but getting them when you are off duty sucks There is no know way for the team to know if people on duty responded to alerts Push sounds are inappropriate for reliable
SIGNL4 provides persistent and real-time alert notifications to your admin team. Sending alert notifications exclusively to members on duty reduces response times, notification noise and fatigue. Ownership of alerts improves accountability and ensures real-time transparency. Sample Use Case We will setup an operational alert for an Azure Database. The alert condition will be based on the total
There is no easier way to receive mobile alert notifications from Splunk than using SIGNL4, a lightweight notification app for powerful mobile alerting and alert management. Update: There is now a Splunkbase SIGNL4 app available. Here is video how it works. Splunk custom alerts go mobile SIGNL4 offers a webhook that makes integrations extremely simple. Any search alert you create
Accessing generic weather information on your smartphone is common these days. But what about custom, condition-based alerts? For instance to Inform your employees automatically about severe weather conditions hampering their morning travel to your office Dispatch snow removal teams Set sails if there are high winds Custom mobile alerts can easily be set up with an automation
Situation Knowing about IT incidents as fast as possible is key in IT Operations Management to ensure maximum IT uptime. Critical incidents or IT problems are often communicated by email only, typically as a broadcast to the complete team. This leads to confusion about who task responsibility (“broadcast dilemma”) and creates “alert fatigue”. Solution SIGNL4 allows
Objective The simple idea is to trigger a signal when a person or an object leaves a specified area. This can be useful for example if you would like to protect cars, boats, containers or construction equipment from being stolen. In our scenario we will just use an ordinary Android phone as our tracking device.
Maintenance of machines is an incredibly important task. And it is important to fix a machine before it completely fails. Once an issue is detected is important to communicate as reliably and quickly as possible to the right engineer. Ideally, the machine is connected directly to team of mobile engineers in charge and can let
Sometimes you need to query an existing mailbox for specific emails instead of forwarding emails directly to your SIGNL4 team email address. This example uses Zapier to query a Gmail mail account. New emails with specific content then trigger alert notifications through SIGNL4. Zapier is great workflow tool and provides integrations with almost any mailbox type.
Business-to-business, also known as B2B, has not always been recognized as the glamorous side of marketing and sales no matter what industry. This is even more evident when discussing the sale of software and enterprise applications. Previously, this was a rather stale environment, however, in today’s strong-buyer scenario, things have begun to change. Due to the abundance
Machines, pumps, valves, fire alert systems, temperature sensors, smoke detectors, etc. often do not offer IT integration. Instead, they provide simple analog cables to interface with dry contacts. Monitoring these I/O states and detecting abnormal behavior or malfunctions a common scenario in industrial IoT. Operations teams in charge of business and operational continuity need to know
Imagine being a child on a playground. You see other children playing tag, climbing, sliding, laughing… and you are digging in the sandbox alone. You are content, but you question if this is the best way to go about your day. Sure, you can go play on the swings for a solid 20 minutes, but that
In a previous article we’ve shown how to send alerts to SIGNL4 from Amazon Alexa. It is also possible to do the same using the Google Assistant, either on your mobile device or using your Google Home speaker. Setting it up is easy if you are tech-savvy. You need an Android phone with the Google Assistant,
The Internet of Things (IoT) has become an exciting area of work. Businesses are rapidly adapting various IoT products whether they realize it or not. Thanks to the booming development of Internet of Things, users across industries can now easily monitor, trigger, and maintain processes and equipment with a brilliant software and strong networks. The infrastructural pieces
*This article was first published on Microsoft’s Manufacturing Industry Blog on July 17, 2018. The fourth industrial revolution, Industry 4.0, is happening today. Recent progress in manufacturing automation requires fewer individuals on a shop floor to do manual work with and at machines. However, those people are now required to respond faster and more effectively
The development and rise of cool, tiny and smart devices of all shapes and functions is the foundation of the Internet of Things (IoT). Many of these mechanisms shared below are relatively small in size, but do not let that fool you. These are powerful products that have been endorsed by many. Today, I will introduce
We live in an age of hyper-connectedness. Specific-function devices are now able to relay information to networks in real-time with ease. To put it simply, we live among the Internet of Things (IoT). In this article, we will dive into what IoT is, where it is headed, and what that means for consumers and businesses in
Field service management (FSM) is the business-official way of mentioning all the operational and administrative work that goes into on-location service delivery. In other words, FSM is the juggling act that involves everything from accounting and customer relationship management (CRM) to service dispatching and enterprise resource planning (ERP). One can find FSM in many industries like IT,
On our smart phones, we receive an abundance of personal and business push notifications every day. Business and business-critical push notifications are meant to be read, ideally acknowledged, and acted on in an attentive manner. The problem is that people cannot always be contacted effectively with a simple push notification. Today I am going to
June 2018 update brings two cool features: Acknowledgement of alerts by all team members (on duty) Sending of alerts to the team from a Web Browser Happy exploring! Group alerting with multiple acknowledgements There are multiple models of how many people are required to acknowledge a critical alert. Typical for IT and other areas of maintenance and
The app-based alerting service SIGNL4, enables you to send alerts from your corporate infrastructure via e-mail or webhook. Your team will then receive the notifications by push, SMS or phone call. But what if the Internet connection is no longer available and you cannot transmit the alerts to SIGNL4? Below we describe a convenient method
In the digital age, it is extremely helpful to have Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tools in place to maximize team productivity. SaaS tools are great because they take essential work tasks, and slim them down into user-friendly web and mobile applications. Below I have recommended five SaaS tools available online. I selected these as they are applicable
SIGNL4 offers easy-to-use interfaces for triggering notifications, e.g. email and Webhook. In some scenarios you might want to send signals manually from a Web portal. Google Forms is one option to add this feature to SIGNL4. The following steps show you how to setup a simple Web form for manually sending signals to your SIGNL4
We are incredibly proud to announce the May 2018 update, which adds the following new features to SIGNL4: Persistent alert notifications via text and voice call In-app triggered alerts transmit current geographic location Alerts can be enriched with maps and geolocation Intelligent notification flood protection algorithm (notification suppression) Extended MDM support (MobileIron) for App Config
SIGNL4 offers a powerful API to extend functionality and to embed it seamlessly into other applications and services. Using the API you can for instance build custom ‘who is on duty’ dashboards or trigger actions in case an alert has been acknowledged in the SIGNL4 mobile app. You can also build a web page to
The April 2018 update adds the following new features to SIGNL4: New methods and method enhancements for the REST API and webhook A new duty & shift length of 14 days Availability in new countries Happy exploring! Outbound webhooks: Correlate alert-status changes and the original event We have addressed requests for better correlation of alert-triggering
When a critical problem needs attention, advice from peers and experts is often valuable. While a phone call might be the fastest way to communicate, there can be circumstances where it doesn’t work or isn’t appropriate. That is why we built a chat feature into SIGNL4. Mobile ChatOps in SIGNL4 The built-in mobile chat is
The problem with push notifications as an alarm channel is that they don’t really alert you when the phone is set to “Do not disturb”. The mobile phone will vibrate only, if at all. Important alarms will be missed. That might turn into a true disaster for important alerts! So what’s the alternative? You can
The February 2018 update adds the following new features to SIGNL4: CSV alert protocols, e.g. for Excel import and analytics Management of linked third-party applications, e. g. Alexa Skill CSV audit trail log of all alarms and notifications With the help of the CSV audit trail protocols, it is now possible to evaluate how many
Alarms in your SIGNL4 team can also be created manually from a Slack conversation. This is basically quite simple and consists of the following digital assets: a custom Slack App for SIGNL4, which you create in your own Slack-Team the Slack EventsAPI (https://api.slack.com/events-api). This API forwards desired messages/information from Slack to a remote HTTP endpoint
We sometimes live in a paradoxical world. Our cars, or those that will soon be automatically brought to us via an Alexa voice command, drive us e. g. independently to the doctor or in front of a furniture store. Once there, however, it is just not possible to read in the chip card for registration
Managers and executives are always interested in current company data and KPIs (“key performance indicators”). This includes information about the current monthly and annual turnover. But also promising customer requests (A leads) that may require the collaboration of several departments. And of course also critical technical incidents at customers who need a quick solution to ensure
With Amazon Alexa, the Internet giant, Amazon, has quickly established itself as a leading company in the field of digital assistants with speech recognition. We here at Derdack SIGNL4 believe that speech recognition will play an enormously important role in the near future in all areas of life and business. In connection with mobile alarming,
Modern alerting systems based on mobile apps can achieve significant efficiency gains in healthcare and reduce the working pressure on nursing staff. Here we describe how such a solution is used for patient and bedside monitoring. Challenges in patient bedside monitoring in hospitals In a hospital, there is an existing patient monitoring system (bedside monitoring system,
Utilities companies represent a particular challenge for modern alarm solutions complementing SCADA systems. Due to the decentralised distribution of installations and plants in rural and urban areas, operation, maintenance and repair are already associated with considerable technical, logistical and personnel expenditure. Several factors that are negligible in centralized scenarios must be taken into account. Location, accessibility,
Urgent breakdown maintenance calls are a common scenario on a shop floor, e.g. in manufacturing or logistics. Response is a critical matter as equipment breakdowns bring your operations to a grinding halt. When a machine breaks down or malfunctions, a maintenance engineer on duty or on call needs to be notified, usually through the machine showing blinking red light or manually
If you are using AWS CloudWatch for monitoring your AWS assets 24/7, an effective routing of alarms to IT personnel during after-business-hours is essential for a swift handling of any problems and incidents occurring any given time of the day. This post explains how to route AWS CloudWatch alarms with SIGNL4 to improve your after hour incident response while using
How can you quickly send an urgent alert to a response team from your desktop browser? Here is a pretty slick example for Google Chrome implemented with zapier and SIGNL4. SIGNL4 is for sending persistent mobile alerts to your response team. It provides for simple duty management (duty check-in & check-out) and routes alerts from other
Nowadays most IT admins will get an email if their website monitoring solution detects a health issue or a website down. Maybe your entire team gets an email. But how likely are you to check your inbox every minute. And don’t you want share on-call duty across your team members? You simply don’t want to have everybody
Are you using Azure Application Insights for health monitoring of your website or web app? If so, I bet you have alerts setup to get notified in case of service health issues. By default, you or your whole team will get an email. But how do you know who took ownership. And in case of urgent issues, how do
SIGNL4 provides a convenient, out-of-the-box solution to send mobile SCOM alerts to your ops teams. With SIGNL4 you can build subject expert teams and send SCOM alerts to team members on duty. With the SIGNL4 mobile app, teams easily check-in and check-out to receive SCOM alerts when they are on call. The mobile app will
Microsoft Flow is a great intuitive workflow and process automation app. It provides a simplified graphic workflow orchestration approach. One of the most used actions in flows is sending or forwarding notifications upon events in your business process. Common notification channels email and mobile push through the Microsoft’ Notification connector. If you need to notify your team and
With SIGNL4, ServiceNow is complemented with intelligent mobile alert notifications for IT ops teams. Alerts will be routed to the right person who is on call/on duty. Team members will be notified persistently until acknowledgement. Incident ownership can be seen and tracked throughout the team. This significantly accelerates the response to critical incidents that need swift attention
IoT platforms such as Cumulocity by Software AG are a crucial part in a proper “Industry 4.0” implementation. The Deutsche Telekom AG is using Cumulocity for their new IoT products like “Predictive Maintenance” and the “Cloud der Dinge Starterkit”. They are used to connect and organize shop floor machines via the Internet for capturing their data
The key to efficient devops procedures lies in responsiveness, clear responsibility and incident ownership. Alerts and notifications are effective tools to increase these key factors. In today’s agile environments with a demanding customer landscape, a rapid response is essential. Alert notifications, ideally of mobile nature, represent a great tool for continuous attention and swift response. Communication
SIGNL4 provides a simple way to use mobile push notification to effectively communicate with closed client and customer communities. It opens an excellent channel in B2B communication. Generally, mobile push is an effective mean of communication. Attention level is high and the message-open rate is significantly great than what email yields. For particularly important B2B-related information, this
When I started with my first Raspberry mini computer, I selected Windows 10 IoT Core as the operating system. This allowed for using Visual Studio and C#. It is not that difficult to call a webhook from your C# code, though a couple of pitfalls await you when your build your Raspberry project (I connected a
Responding to OMS alerts occuring in after-hours can be challenging with Microsoft’s native mobile app, because: People forget to turn off notifications when their duty has ended, but getting them when you are off duty sucks There is no know way for the team to know if people on duty responded to alerts Push sounds are inappropriate for reliable
SIGNL4 provides persistent and real-time alert notifications to your admin team. Sending alert notifications exclusively to members on duty reduces response times, notification noise and fatigue. Ownership of alerts improves accountability and ensures real-time transparency. Sample Use Case We will setup an operational alert for an Azure Database. The alert condition will be based on the total
There is no easier way to receive mobile alert notifications from Splunk than using SIGNL4, a lightweight notification app for powerful mobile alerting and alert management. Update: There is now a Splunkbase SIGNL4 app available. Here is video how it works. Splunk custom alerts go mobile SIGNL4 offers a webhook that makes integrations extremely simple. Any search alert you create
Accessing generic weather information on your smartphone is common these days. But what about custom, condition-based alerts? For instance to Inform your employees automatically about severe weather conditions hampering their morning travel to your office Dispatch snow removal teams Set sails if there are high winds Custom mobile alerts can easily be set up with an automation
Situation Knowing about IT incidents as fast as possible is key in IT Operations Management to ensure maximum IT uptime. Critical incidents or IT problems are often communicated by email only, typically as a broadcast to the complete team. This leads to confusion about who task responsibility (“broadcast dilemma”) and creates “alert fatigue”. Solution SIGNL4 allows
Objective The simple idea is to trigger a signal when a person or an object leaves a specified area. This can be useful for example if you would like to protect cars, boats, containers or construction equipment from being stolen. In our scenario we will just use an ordinary Android phone as our tracking device.
Maintenance of machines is an incredibly important task. And it is important to fix a machine before it completely fails. Once an issue is detected is important to communicate as reliably and quickly as possible to the right engineer. Ideally, the machine is connected directly to team of mobile engineers in charge and can let