A good alerting strategy is an important prerequisite for successful operations management and the availability of mission-critical systems. But also for employee satisfaction. It’s not just about sending out alerts upon critical conditions, problems and failures at all, but more importantly, about how it is done. Here are the 5 most typical mistakes, their consequences
SIGNL4 helps to reliably alert service technicians in facility management, no matter where they are located.
Event and alert filtering matters because alert fatigue is one of the most crucial issues in alerting and alert management. SIGNL4 implements a lightweight and effective way of filtering events. The overall process is based on alert categories. Alert categories are applied using a keyword search across the entire payload of incoming third-party events. But
When you send alerts, work orders or service requests to your workers in the field, on the shop floor or campus it is essential to provide them with all relevant information necessary to solve the task. This prevents misunderstandings, avoids waste work, time for searching information and thus increases productivity and facilities an effective, timely
With our February 2021 update, we have added more features to our account management portal. We’ve now added a copy mode to the duty and shift calendar providing an even better shift and duty scheduling experience. You can now also monitor your personal profile and change your password in the account portal. We have now
SIGNL4 now includes a new app for connecting to ConnectWise Manage (“Manage”). This makes 2-way integration with Manage a breeze, and responding to service desk tickets can now be done conveniently via mobile app in SIGNL4. This blog article has all the important details. What features does the integration offer? The integration offers the following
You have a web site, app, online shop, or SaaS offering? Then you have plenty of user actions. That can be visiting a certain page, signing up for a service or canceling a subscription. Wouldn’t it be great to know in real time when an important customer action takes place? This would allow you sales,
Our December update lets it rip once again: From now on, you can create and manage multiple teams in your SIGNL4 subscription. For this purpose, we have also added a new user role and enhanced our web app. This makes it much easier to centrally manage multiple departments in your organization. Creating, setting up and
Our October update brings the long-awaited mute-overwrite on iPhone (‘critical alerts’). We also introduce an undo action for Signl acknowledgements or closures. And in the web app you can now batch-ack and close to multiple Signls at once. All new features are introduced below – enjoy. Mute-overwrite on iPhones (Critical Alerts) We are delighted to
Handover procedures in operations and maintenance are a key element of business continuity. As work in this field is usually organized in shifts, it is essential to keep track of any critical incidents, machine breakdowns, job ownership, completion, issues that are still open or unresolved and other related items. Such knowledge has a significant impact
If you are still handing over a shared on-call duty phone or pager (sometimes called ‘operations phone’), it is time to rethink your process. The Covid19-induced new normal has a dramatic impact on our work live and social behavior. We work from home and that is especially true for the IT workforce. We meet with
Our September update provides you with self-service API key management from the SIGNL4 web portal. Finally, you can fully exploit our comprehensive REST API. We also improved management of outbound webhook which can update your systems with any information on Signl handling. API Key Management It is now possible to manage API keys for the
Do you know this situation? You are on-call and in the middle of the night you get a phone call. Loud enough to wake you up. Loud enough to wake your wife up, as well. You stand up and check your emails to see what the problem is. OK, you got it. Then you log
A new article in the September issue of German magazine LANLine (“Automation creates productivity”) summarizes typical challenges and problems in network monitoring very well and is worth reading. I would like to briefly discuss some of the problems addressed and how our product SIGNL4 was developed as a solution for exactly these problems. Problem 1:
SIGNL4’s core job is to reliably alert operational teams. However, we’ve been asked a couple of times if SIGNL4 can also monitor a website’s uptime. Well, we developed an app and it is now available in the SIGNL4 app gallery. You can now monitor the availability of websites AND get instantly alerted if it goes
Our August update now makes it easy to assign team responsibilities for individual systems through our categories. This is no longer only possible by each team member in the mobile app, but can now also be done centrally in the web portal by the team administrator. All details can be found in this blog article.
Our July update brings new features to the email and webhook API’s. You can now close alerts in SIGNL4 when the issue was resolved in your backend system. Use Case A typical use case is IT monitoring and auto-recovery. Imagine you get an alert in the middle of the night about an IT issue. A
Microsoft Azure customers worldwide now gain access to SIGNL4 to take advantage of the scalability, reliability and agility of Azure to drive application development and shape business strategies. Richmond, June 15 2020 Today, Derdack (www.signl4.com), provider of critical alerting for operations teams, announced the availability of SIGNL4 in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, an online store
With many companies utilizing remote-working during the COVID-19 pandemic, effective communication is more important than ever. Unfortunately, being in the middle of responding to a global pandemic will not prevent your organization from suffering from other business disruptions. Likely disruptions you may face are: Cyber/ phishing attacks – these attacks can cripple your regular communication
Our May update brings new features to our Signl Center in the web app and adds a new view that displays your upcoming duties to the mobile app! Upcoming Duties Preview When part of an on-call duty team, your private life and work-life-balance are pretty much affected. Knowing about scheduled duties in advance and having
Our April update is BIG. It introduces emergency alerting to reach you entire team. We hope this will be a bit of humble support to your organization in this Covid-19 crisis. The core of this release is the new signl center, the new place to track alerts and their delivery in real-time, to see incoming
SIGNL4 provides great support for geolocation information and in multiple ways. When a new alert with geolocation information is displayed in the mobile app, the app renders a map to visualize geographic information of the incident. A double click allows to open the default map application on the mobile device, e.g. to get directions or
“Servcies&Systems” category subscriptions provide a highly flexible way of routing alerts to specific user groups. This can for instance be used to route alerts based on responsibilities or skills. But other scenarios are possible too as the category subscription mechanism is extremely powerful. First layer of alert routing – duty status SIGNL4 currently provides
SIGNL4 provides plug-and-play chatbot integrations with Microsoft Teams and Slack, both via certified chatbot apps. Why does it makes sense to integrate SIGNL4 with chat tools after all? There are two basic uses cases that we address with the integration into Teams and Slack. Using Teams and Slack as additional notification channels By default,
Our first SIGNL4 release tin 2020 includes some great new features. Have a look: Notify your Legacy Pager For all those who still need to work with pager devices in addition to their smartphone, it is now possible to include this device in the alarm workflow. This might be the case to secure alert delivery
Event and alert severity are extremely important information for an effective alert management and response. Severity information determine the speed of response, needed resource allocation and the action path taken. Naturally, critical alerts have higher priority than major alerts which again overrule minor alerts. However, as monitoring, security and other control systems have different ways
We are more than excited to host our first ‘ask me anything’ session on SIGNL4. Here is our agenda: You will meet our experts Matt, René and Patrick. Any questions or feature requests can be discussed and answered here. We will give you an update on the latest features additions Get exclusive insights into our
Our 2nd December update adds alert counters to the web app, allows for disabling the opt-in/out from “Services & Systems” categories and adds a new encoding format to the SIGNL4 webbhook. New webhook payload format The SIGNL4 webhook now also digest payload of ‘application/x-www-form-urlencoded‘ type. A payload/webhook call of this kind would like: POST /webhook/ihdm29y8
Our December update includes a new role model for users in a SIGNL4 team, great new app features and integration with Azure Sentinel. Introducing user roles Two default user roles are now available in each SIGNL4 team: Administrator and User. This allows for restricting standard user rights versus administrative access. For existing teams, all users
Have you ever wanted to get important alerts from Azure Monitor notified on your smartphone and have all the important details of the problem at your fingertips? Have you ever missed the option to easily change the status of alerts from Azure Monitor in the Azure smartphone app? Ever missed a push notification because there
This article describes how SIGNL4 can be generally authorized as an enterprise app for Azure AD users (Marketplace Link). This is important if you want to implement the use of SIGNL4 in your company with existing user accounts from the Azure AD. Initial situation Using SIGNL4 through existing user accounts (“single sign on”) in your
The October update of the mobile app includes the improvements described below and the user experience includes a new feature. Simplified handling of categories The user interface of the app has been improved so that you can now decide for yourself if you want to see all Signls on the dashboard differentiated by categories. Using
Our September update improves the assignment of categories to Signl alerts, hence the enrichment and routing of alerts to the right people. New Category Assignment Operator Until now, a ‘Services & Systems’ category was assigned to a Signl alert, if at least one of the entered keywords was found in the event content or text
Our August update makes SIGNL4 fit for the new “Payment Services Directive 2”. In addition, we have added extended the mobile alert dashboard and added new metrics. The enhanced dashboard of the SIGNL4 mobile app now shows alert counters per ‘services & systems’ category. Here come the details…. Category Dashboard Metrics When opening the SIGNL4
July 2019 Update introduces the option to opt-out for certain categories as well as some enhancements in the Web portal. Manage which alerts you want and how: ‘Services & Systems’ Category Opt-Out You can now opt-in/out of certain categories under Settings -> Services & Systems. This works on a per-user basis and is useful when
We are super-excited about launching our new referral partner program, SIGNL4Partners. The program is dedicated to solution providers and system integrators just like you. Any company can join the program, no matter if you are an IoT Hardware vendor or specialize in software solutions. Benefits of joining SIGNL4Partners are: 20% revenue share from all registered
The May 2019 Update introduces web sign-up and some great, long-awaited mobile app enhancements! Mobile App: Multi-Alert Confirmation and Resolution We have added the capability to confirm and resolve multiple alert signls at once. Simply tap the new 3-dot-button on the top right and select “Confirm all” / “Resolve all”. Please keep in mind that these
IT downtime can effect businesses of all sizes. From online retailers and event promoters to cloud-based service providers and 24/7 security teams, all modern businesses are at risk of facing both monetary and organizational costs that can stack up in a matter of minutes. Users (internal and external) may not be able to access websites
This article explains the simplicity and effectiveness of alert escalation in SIGNL4. The case for alert escalations Part of any managers role is to make sure their team is taking accountability. Managers are not the front lines resolvers that handle issues, that is what they have a team for. However, managers do need to be
Many businesses of all sizes are now aware of the never-ending security risks that threaten the condition of their IT infrastructure. Larger companies have begun to adopt Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) software solutions to assist in the daily oversight of their IT security. By taking the best elements of Security Event Management (SEM), which
This update introduces an effective mechanism for event filtering to SIGNL4. You can now use the keywords of your ‘services & systems’ categories as a whitelist. If you enable this keyword whitelist, SIGNL4 performs a keyword search across all parameters and content of a received event (e.g. received by email or webhook). It will then
The February 2019 update brings the long anticipated duty and shift scheduling. It further improves SIGNL4’s capabilities of delivering the right information to the right people at the right time. Shift Scheduling Basics Shift scheduling in SIGNL4 is done through the account/team management portal. It works with any browser and provides an enormous flexibility. You
An upset customer is calling your service hotline in the middle of night because an important system stopped working. A sleepy engineer, just woken up by that call, somehow tries to answer the bullet-like questions of your customer. The result: unhappiness on both sides. Sounds familiar? Here is what you can do: For an enterprise
SIGNL4 is a mobile SaaS solution built to address the needs of on-the-go operations teams across many industries. Stemming from German parent company, Derdack, SIGNL4 looks to provide agility and reliability where other solutions on the market may not. Aside from its core strength in persistent mobile team alerting, this application has been developed taking ino account recent trends in software
Though SIGNL4 does not provide canned reports (yet), it allows for downloading all required data of on-call times, alerts and responses. Hence all it takes is an external tool to process and analyse those logs. Shift and alerts logs can be used to review workload of your team members, frequency of certain alert types, hours
The update of December 2018 adds great features for enriching Signls with additional information (‘alert enrichment’). With “Services and Systems” categories, SIGNL4 already comes with an unique approach of categorizing alerts through colouring and acoustics, i.e. a dedicated push sound. But why not use this categorization feature for adding information to Signl alerts? Why is
The short answer is: “Yes, SIGNL4 can.” SIGNL4 can be seen as a so-called “pager app” for Android and iPhone. But more than that. Here is the how and why of it. A pager is a small radio receiver. Each pager has a unique code or phone number. All the pagers that are in everyone’s
Many cities provide snow clearing services. It is especially important at night to inform teams about snow warnings as snow accumulation can be troublesome for the masses in the morning of the following day. When to expect snow can be found online, but is this form of weather detection reliable enough to mobilize service teams
The AWS IoT Button is a great IoT device. A simple press of a button turns into unlimited possibilities. And with SIGNL4 you can easily trigger mobile alerts to operations or security teams. Almost in real-time. What is the AWS IoT Button? The AWS IoT Button is the ‘unlinked’ version of the Amazon Dash Button
The November update introduces central management and licensing of multiple teams. Multiple teams can now be billed through a single account. This eases purchasing and license management for anybody with more than one team on SIGNL4. Additionally, teams can centrally be created, stocked up with user licenses and even deleted. How does it work? The
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 critical 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
We live in a somewhat 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
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
A good alerting strategy is an important prerequisite for successful operations management and the availability of mission-critical systems. But also for employee satisfaction. It’s not just about sending out alerts upon critical conditions, problems and failures at all, but more importantly, about how it is done. Here are the 5 most typical mistakes, their consequences
SIGNL4 helps to reliably alert service technicians in facility management, no matter where they are located.
Event and alert filtering matters because alert fatigue is one of the most crucial issues in alerting and alert management. SIGNL4 implements a lightweight and effective way of filtering events. The overall process is based on alert categories. Alert categories are applied using a keyword search across the entire payload of incoming third-party events. But
When you send alerts, work orders or service requests to your workers in the field, on the shop floor or campus it is essential to provide them with all relevant information necessary to solve the task. This prevents misunderstandings, avoids waste work, time for searching information and thus increases productivity and facilities an effective, timely
With our February 2021 update, we have added more features to our account management portal. We’ve now added a copy mode to the duty and shift calendar providing an even better shift and duty scheduling experience. You can now also monitor your personal profile and change your password in the account portal. We have now
SIGNL4 now includes a new app for connecting to ConnectWise Manage (“Manage”). This makes 2-way integration with Manage a breeze, and responding to service desk tickets can now be done conveniently via mobile app in SIGNL4. This blog article has all the important details. What features does the integration offer? The integration offers the following
You have a web site, app, online shop, or SaaS offering? Then you have plenty of user actions. That can be visiting a certain page, signing up for a service or canceling a subscription. Wouldn’t it be great to know in real time when an important customer action takes place? This would allow you sales,
Our December update lets it rip once again: From now on, you can create and manage multiple teams in your SIGNL4 subscription. For this purpose, we have also added a new user role and enhanced our web app. This makes it much easier to centrally manage multiple departments in your organization. Creating, setting up and
Our October update brings the long-awaited mute-overwrite on iPhone (‘critical alerts’). We also introduce an undo action for Signl acknowledgements or closures. And in the web app you can now batch-ack and close to multiple Signls at once. All new features are introduced below – enjoy. Mute-overwrite on iPhones (Critical Alerts) We are delighted to
Handover procedures in operations and maintenance are a key element of business continuity. As work in this field is usually organized in shifts, it is essential to keep track of any critical incidents, machine breakdowns, job ownership, completion, issues that are still open or unresolved and other related items. Such knowledge has a significant impact
If you are still handing over a shared on-call duty phone or pager (sometimes called ‘operations phone’), it is time to rethink your process. The Covid19-induced new normal has a dramatic impact on our work live and social behavior. We work from home and that is especially true for the IT workforce. We meet with
Our September update provides you with self-service API key management from the SIGNL4 web portal. Finally, you can fully exploit our comprehensive REST API. We also improved management of outbound webhook which can update your systems with any information on Signl handling. API Key Management It is now possible to manage API keys for the
Do you know this situation? You are on-call and in the middle of the night you get a phone call. Loud enough to wake you up. Loud enough to wake your wife up, as well. You stand up and check your emails to see what the problem is. OK, you got it. Then you log
A new article in the September issue of German magazine LANLine (“Automation creates productivity”) summarizes typical challenges and problems in network monitoring very well and is worth reading. I would like to briefly discuss some of the problems addressed and how our product SIGNL4 was developed as a solution for exactly these problems. Problem 1:
SIGNL4’s core job is to reliably alert operational teams. However, we’ve been asked a couple of times if SIGNL4 can also monitor a website’s uptime. Well, we developed an app and it is now available in the SIGNL4 app gallery. You can now monitor the availability of websites AND get instantly alerted if it goes
Our August update now makes it easy to assign team responsibilities for individual systems through our categories. This is no longer only possible by each team member in the mobile app, but can now also be done centrally in the web portal by the team administrator. All details can be found in this blog article.
Our July update brings new features to the email and webhook API’s. You can now close alerts in SIGNL4 when the issue was resolved in your backend system. Use Case A typical use case is IT monitoring and auto-recovery. Imagine you get an alert in the middle of the night about an IT issue. A
Microsoft Azure customers worldwide now gain access to SIGNL4 to take advantage of the scalability, reliability and agility of Azure to drive application development and shape business strategies. Richmond, June 15 2020 Today, Derdack (www.signl4.com), provider of critical alerting for operations teams, announced the availability of SIGNL4 in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, an online store
With many companies utilizing remote-working during the COVID-19 pandemic, effective communication is more important than ever. Unfortunately, being in the middle of responding to a global pandemic will not prevent your organization from suffering from other business disruptions. Likely disruptions you may face are: Cyber/ phishing attacks – these attacks can cripple your regular communication
Our May update brings new features to our Signl Center in the web app and adds a new view that displays your upcoming duties to the mobile app! Upcoming Duties Preview When part of an on-call duty team, your private life and work-life-balance are pretty much affected. Knowing about scheduled duties in advance and having
Our April update is BIG. It introduces emergency alerting to reach you entire team. We hope this will be a bit of humble support to your organization in this Covid-19 crisis. The core of this release is the new signl center, the new place to track alerts and their delivery in real-time, to see incoming
SIGNL4 provides great support for geolocation information and in multiple ways. When a new alert with geolocation information is displayed in the mobile app, the app renders a map to visualize geographic information of the incident. A double click allows to open the default map application on the mobile device, e.g. to get directions or
“Servcies&Systems” category subscriptions provide a highly flexible way of routing alerts to specific user groups. This can for instance be used to route alerts based on responsibilities or skills. But other scenarios are possible too as the category subscription mechanism is extremely powerful. First layer of alert routing – duty status SIGNL4 currently provides
SIGNL4 provides plug-and-play chatbot integrations with Microsoft Teams and Slack, both via certified chatbot apps. Why does it makes sense to integrate SIGNL4 with chat tools after all? There are two basic uses cases that we address with the integration into Teams and Slack. Using Teams and Slack as additional notification channels By default,
Our first SIGNL4 release tin 2020 includes some great new features. Have a look: Notify your Legacy Pager For all those who still need to work with pager devices in addition to their smartphone, it is now possible to include this device in the alarm workflow. This might be the case to secure alert delivery
Event and alert severity are extremely important information for an effective alert management and response. Severity information determine the speed of response, needed resource allocation and the action path taken. Naturally, critical alerts have higher priority than major alerts which again overrule minor alerts. However, as monitoring, security and other control systems have different ways
We are more than excited to host our first ‘ask me anything’ session on SIGNL4. Here is our agenda: You will meet our experts Matt, René and Patrick. Any questions or feature requests can be discussed and answered here. We will give you an update on the latest features additions Get exclusive insights into our
Our 2nd December update adds alert counters to the web app, allows for disabling the opt-in/out from “Services & Systems” categories and adds a new encoding format to the SIGNL4 webbhook. New webhook payload format The SIGNL4 webhook now also digest payload of ‘application/x-www-form-urlencoded‘ type. A payload/webhook call of this kind would like: POST /webhook/ihdm29y8
Our December update includes a new role model for users in a SIGNL4 team, great new app features and integration with Azure Sentinel. Introducing user roles Two default user roles are now available in each SIGNL4 team: Administrator and User. This allows for restricting standard user rights versus administrative access. For existing teams, all users
Have you ever wanted to get important alerts from Azure Monitor notified on your smartphone and have all the important details of the problem at your fingertips? Have you ever missed the option to easily change the status of alerts from Azure Monitor in the Azure smartphone app? Ever missed a push notification because there
This article describes how SIGNL4 can be generally authorized as an enterprise app for Azure AD users (Marketplace Link). This is important if you want to implement the use of SIGNL4 in your company with existing user accounts from the Azure AD. Initial situation Using SIGNL4 through existing user accounts (“single sign on”) in your
The October update of the mobile app includes the improvements described below and the user experience includes a new feature. Simplified handling of categories The user interface of the app has been improved so that you can now decide for yourself if you want to see all Signls on the dashboard differentiated by categories. Using
Our September update improves the assignment of categories to Signl alerts, hence the enrichment and routing of alerts to the right people. New Category Assignment Operator Until now, a ‘Services & Systems’ category was assigned to a Signl alert, if at least one of the entered keywords was found in the event content or text
Our August update makes SIGNL4 fit for the new “Payment Services Directive 2”. In addition, we have added extended the mobile alert dashboard and added new metrics. The enhanced dashboard of the SIGNL4 mobile app now shows alert counters per ‘services & systems’ category. Here come the details…. Category Dashboard Metrics When opening the SIGNL4
July 2019 Update introduces the option to opt-out for certain categories as well as some enhancements in the Web portal. Manage which alerts you want and how: ‘Services & Systems’ Category Opt-Out You can now opt-in/out of certain categories under Settings -> Services & Systems. This works on a per-user basis and is useful when
We are super-excited about launching our new referral partner program, SIGNL4Partners. The program is dedicated to solution providers and system integrators just like you. Any company can join the program, no matter if you are an IoT Hardware vendor or specialize in software solutions. Benefits of joining SIGNL4Partners are: 20% revenue share from all registered
The May 2019 Update introduces web sign-up and some great, long-awaited mobile app enhancements! Mobile App: Multi-Alert Confirmation and Resolution We have added the capability to confirm and resolve multiple alert signls at once. Simply tap the new 3-dot-button on the top right and select “Confirm all” / “Resolve all”. Please keep in mind that these
IT downtime can effect businesses of all sizes. From online retailers and event promoters to cloud-based service providers and 24/7 security teams, all modern businesses are at risk of facing both monetary and organizational costs that can stack up in a matter of minutes. Users (internal and external) may not be able to access websites
This article explains the simplicity and effectiveness of alert escalation in SIGNL4. The case for alert escalations Part of any managers role is to make sure their team is taking accountability. Managers are not the front lines resolvers that handle issues, that is what they have a team for. However, managers do need to be
Many businesses of all sizes are now aware of the never-ending security risks that threaten the condition of their IT infrastructure. Larger companies have begun to adopt Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) software solutions to assist in the daily oversight of their IT security. By taking the best elements of Security Event Management (SEM), which
This update introduces an effective mechanism for event filtering to SIGNL4. You can now use the keywords of your ‘services & systems’ categories as a whitelist. If you enable this keyword whitelist, SIGNL4 performs a keyword search across all parameters and content of a received event (e.g. received by email or webhook). It will then
The February 2019 update brings the long anticipated duty and shift scheduling. It further improves SIGNL4’s capabilities of delivering the right information to the right people at the right time. Shift Scheduling Basics Shift scheduling in SIGNL4 is done through the account/team management portal. It works with any browser and provides an enormous flexibility. You
An upset customer is calling your service hotline in the middle of night because an important system stopped working. A sleepy engineer, just woken up by that call, somehow tries to answer the bullet-like questions of your customer. The result: unhappiness on both sides. Sounds familiar? Here is what you can do: For an enterprise
SIGNL4 is a mobile SaaS solution built to address the needs of on-the-go operations teams across many industries. Stemming from German parent company, Derdack, SIGNL4 looks to provide agility and reliability where other solutions on the market may not. Aside from its core strength in persistent mobile team alerting, this application has been developed taking ino account recent trends in software
Though SIGNL4 does not provide canned reports (yet), it allows for downloading all required data of on-call times, alerts and responses. Hence all it takes is an external tool to process and analyse those logs. Shift and alerts logs can be used to review workload of your team members, frequency of certain alert types, hours
The update of December 2018 adds great features for enriching Signls with additional information (‘alert enrichment’). With “Services and Systems” categories, SIGNL4 already comes with an unique approach of categorizing alerts through colouring and acoustics, i.e. a dedicated push sound. But why not use this categorization feature for adding information to Signl alerts? Why is
The short answer is: “Yes, SIGNL4 can.” SIGNL4 can be seen as a so-called “pager app” for Android and iPhone. But more than that. Here is the how and why of it. A pager is a small radio receiver. Each pager has a unique code or phone number. All the pagers that are in everyone’s
Many cities provide snow clearing services. It is especially important at night to inform teams about snow warnings as snow accumulation can be troublesome for the masses in the morning of the following day. When to expect snow can be found online, but is this form of weather detection reliable enough to mobilize service teams
The AWS IoT Button is a great IoT device. A simple press of a button turns into unlimited possibilities. And with SIGNL4 you can easily trigger mobile alerts to operations or security teams. Almost in real-time. What is the AWS IoT Button? The AWS IoT Button is the ‘unlinked’ version of the Amazon Dash Button
The November update introduces central management and licensing of multiple teams. Multiple teams can now be billed through a single account. This eases purchasing and license management for anybody with more than one team on SIGNL4. Additionally, teams can centrally be created, stocked up with user licenses and even deleted. How does it work? The
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 critical 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
We live in a somewhat 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
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