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 options are abundant and include SMS text, emails, push, instant messaging and chat tools like HipChat or Slack.

Requirements for great DevOps Notification

However, an ideal solution cuts through the noise. It adds more to the table and thus increase effectiveness through avoiding spam, marking relevance of alerts and notify the right people. A solution that can track ownership of DevOps alerts, e.g. by requesting an alert confirmation, will help to avoid miscommunication and misunderstandings. If this tracking is transparent your whole and management can be kept in the loop.

So, based on our own experience I would pinpoint the following items:

1. Be able to filter alerts and remove spam
2. Notify people based on their skills and responsibility, don’t broadcast
3. Notify people based on their timely availability (shifts, on-call schedule)
4. Visualize alerts based on their content and relevance
5. Notify persistently to increase attention
6. Require an acknowledgement to ensure ownership
7. Provide an transparent response audit trail
8. See all relevant alerts in a single place

Of course, a DevOps notification solution should be easy to use, easy to set up, easy to maintain.

DevOps with the SIGNL4 App

Well, how does this look with SIGNL4 in reality?

Integration

SIGNL4 provides a webhook API, so it is easily integrated. Alternatively, you can also use the SMTP/email interface if your dev or monitoring tools do not support webhooks. You simply address your team and we do the mobile routing to the right people.

Ensuring Ownership – persistent Alerts

With the SIGNL4 mobile app we provide an effective way to notify people on their mobile devices and to request acknowledgement. The mobile app also provides for persistent notifications making sure no alert falls through the cracks.

Delivering alerts to the right people

SIGNL4 provides a simple but highly effective punch-in & punch-out mechanism to manage timely availability of staff. It can also monitor and ensure adequate staffing levels.

Track alerts and Responses

Team managers and members get instant access to all alerts, related responses, acknowledgements and annotations. Anywhere.

Relevance

SIGNL4 provides for an identification of alert ownership. This is through visual categories and clear parameter display for each alert. You can define unlimited categories that will identify and visualize “Services & Systems” that are relevant to you.

Summary

Your DevOps can greatly benefit from smart alert notifications and the SIGNL4 mobile app is an amazing and effective way to get you going quickly and conveniently. You can test drive SIGNL4 for free and upgrade to one of the professional plans any time.

Get started with SIGNL4 today