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 events and how they are processed.
Emergency alerting
You can now send emergency alert to your entire team with a single click. Using the new emergency switch in the webportal or using the emergency signl feature of the mobile app, creates an alert that is sent to your entire team discarding the duty status. It notifies each user of your team via all configured notification channels and requires an acknowledgement from all users.
Emergency alarms can easily be triggered via the new Signl Center (new menu item “Signls” – detailed presentation in the next section) via the button “New Signl”. To send an emergency signl, you need to enable the emergency switch. Then enter your subject and message text and hit the “Send” button. You can then track delivery of your signl in the Signl Center.
The Signl Center – real-time event and alert tracking
Until today, all of your team’s Signls have been accessible in the mobile app only, except for the delayed tracking in the audit trails. With our new Signl Center, this changes! From now on, all events and Signls for your team are displayed in the web app. All tracking and all status updates are in real-time. You can track who acknowledged and closed a Signl, who receives which alert notifications are delivered and when.
Event tracking
And you can also track events from your 3rd party systems and apps, e.g. sent via webhook, email or 2-way connector app. This finally puts an end to questions like “Did the sensor even trigger?” or “Did my monitor alarm rule apply?”. All events arrivinh in SIGNL4 via your team’s APIs will be displayed here. You track if an event actually triggered a Signl alert or if it was filtered because a white list was active. From an event you can directly jump to the related Signl that went out to your team.
The new Signl Center also features a full-terxt search and additional filtering.
Clicking an event or Signl entry opens more details and parameter view.
Signl tracking
Signls for your team including all associated notification messages (e.g. push, call, SMS) can be found under the “Signls” tab.
There are various filters to narrow down the number of displayed Signls. Setting the time range provides quick access to Signls of the last duty, the current duty, the last 24h or a custom period, thus significantly easing any search. The additional text search or the status filter ensure that any Signl can be found quicklyl.
Clicking on a Signl item from the table expands a detail view. It shows additional status information, chat messages left by your mobile work force and the delivery status of each individual notification message, also for each team member. We also added a true push message delivery status.
Please note, that time range of available events and signls depends on the data retention period defined in your subscription plan. Details can be found here on our plan overview.
Goodbye “I never got that alert”
You are probably familiar with the situation in which incident response did not work perfectly. A system was no longer available and the failure was noticed by end users or key stakeholders. Why? Apparently the on-call service had not responded. The colleagues who were on duty now state that they were not alerted and that they had not received any messages. But is that also true? You can now answer this question with two clicks: In the Signl Center in the far right column, click on the “All” link, whereupon you will see all the members of your team. You then select the colleague who was on call at the time of the incident. The content of the status column is then filtered for the selected colleague. You will then see the delivery status of the alarm for this team member. It can then be easily recognized whether the person was no longer on duty (punched out?) Or notification delivery to his device was unsuccessful.
API enhancements
Our SIGNL4 REST API offers a range of new methods for instance to retrieve Signls and to acknowledge or close multiple Signls. We are also working on API key self-management to make the use of the REST API a lot easier for you.
We are truly happy about this new release and we hope you will be as excited as we are. Let is know if you have any feedback. We hope that you,, your team and family are well and stay healthy!