Meet a typical challenge of 24/7 IT operations
Net at Work is a German IT company with over 100 employees that provides its customers with solutions and tools for digital communication and collaboration. Their product NoSpamProxy offers reliable protection against spam and ransomware, legally compliant email encryption and more. Net at Work customers monitor NoSpamProxy with a network monitoring tool. Despite the extensive monitoring capabilities, the conventional notification channels such as email and SMS were not effective enough to communicate issues (IT, email, full disk, etc.) in a timely and reliable manner.
The employees were concerned about missing a critical alert. Net at Work divides the workday into two shifts, with one employee and one manager on duty at each time. After 5 pm, normal business hours end and the on-call duty begins. The employees wanted to be able to respond quickly and effectively to critical incidents at any time of the day. It was particularly important to be able to wake up the on-call person at night if necessary to draw attention to critical incidents. Moreover, it was important to escalate to a manager if needed. Also their network monitoring tool did not have a mobile app to view real-time information on the go.
Solution
The critical necessity to always be able to act quickly underscored the urgency of a robust and reliable alert solution that meets the specific requirements of Net at Work. While looking for a solution that complements the monitoring tool and is quick and easy to integrate, they opted for SIGNL4. Their focus was being on providing the best possible service and highest availability to the customers. Meanwhile, Icinga has been introduced as a monitoring solution, where SIGNL4 also integrates seamlessly. 
The pre-filtering of important and unimportant alerts is already done in Icinga. Icinga alerts are sent with SIGNL4 to add mobile alerting, which is primarily done via app push (with override do-not-disturb) and voice call. SIGNL4 ensures that alerts are loud and clear in order to wake up the on-call person at night if necessary. Alarms are reliably transmitted to the responsible persons. If the on-call person does not respond within a given time, an escalation to the manager occurs.
Additionally employees can acknowledge critical incidents and clarify responsibilities. Hence the team is informed about who is taking care of each incidents. The integrated duty scheduling in SIGNL4 proved to be a valuable feature. SIGNL4 allows quick and easy duty scheduling via drag and drop in any browser. Also it shows a preview of the upcoming shifts for each employee in the mobile app. Furthermore employees are reminded of their upcoming service with a mobile notification. The integration of SIGNL4 with Microsoft Teams is used by Net at Work for information exchange and for documenting procedures.
What do Net at Work employees say?
“Thanks to SIGNL4, we are able to provide secure 24×7 operations for our customers. It fits 100% into our systems and does exactly what it’s supposed. Due to the fast and competent support we’re feeling confident that we made the right decision with SIGNL4.”
Stefan Cink, Business Unit Manager NoSpamProxy
Enjoyed benefits
By integrating SIGNL4 with Icinga, Net At Work employees can send targeted alerts instantly to the right people at the right time. SIGNL4 provides a “who-is-on-duty” – board and displays who acknowledged the alert.
SIGNL4 enables mobile notifications via app push, SMS email and call. Notification patterns can be configured individually. This ensures that the team is reliably informed about critical incidents and can act immediately and efficiently. Knowing they will be woken up reliably when incidents occur, employees can sleep soundly again and are only woken up in emergencies.
Net at Work particularly appreciates SIGNL4’s extensive degree of automation supported by APIs and automated alert routing based on the on-call schedule, as well as the seamless integration into Icinga and Microsoft Teams.
About Net at Work and NoSpamProxy
As an IT company, Net at Work supports its customers with solutions and tools for digital communication and collaboration. The “software house” business unit develops and markets NoSpamProxy, an integrated secure e-mail gateway for reliable protection against spam and ransomware, legally compliant e-mail encryption, easy sending of large files and central management of e-mail disclaimers. With its “Made in Germany” security features, NoSpamProxy perfectly complements Office365 and is available in the cloud and on-premises. More than 4,000 customers entrust the security of their email communication to the multiple award-winning solution – including test winner in the independent techconsult Professional User Ranking.
If you want to ensure reliable alerting of your employees in the future, click here to test SIGNL4 for 30 days for free.
You can also download the complete Net at Work case study as a PDF.
