Our Blog
The Derdack SIGNL4 blog is an essential hub for professionals aiming to boost their alert management and operational response. It delivers expert insights and tips on maximizing SIGNL4 for efficient alerting, team collaboration, and incident management. Ideal for IT, operations, and security teams, this blog offers practical guidance for enhancing response times and operational workflows.
Enhancing Team Collaboration: Unveiling the Intuitive Features of SIGNL4
Effective communication lies at the heart of successful teamwork, and SIGNL4 emerges as a powerful tool crafted to elevate collaboration within teams. In this blog post, we will explore five of the often small but all the more intuitive features that distinguish...
Mobile Alerts for Icinga at Net at Work
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...
March 2024 Update – Design update, Stand-ins via mobile App, Configurable shift reminders and reports as well as customizable data retention
With our SIGNL4 March Update, we are speeding up and have once again completed some innovations for you. This time, we have further developed our design and color scheme slightly and made changes for better readability. In our mobile app, you can now also quickly and...
Joe’s Triumph with an Alert Fatigue Solution
In the fast-paced world of operations management, every alert bears weight, and Joe's team found themselves caught in a relentless stream of notifications. The challenge they faced was alert fatigue – a persistent obstacle that blurred the lines between critical...
What is alert fatigue?
Alert fatigue is a serious issue that affects numerous professions, e.g. in IT or healthcare. It can lead to neglecting critical events and delaying response times. Responders need to continuously monitor their systems and applications to avert possible downtime and...
Incident Response Explained: Frameworks, Automation, and the Path to Faster Recovery
Incident response is one of the most important foundations of a strong cybersecurity strategy. Organizations rely on it to quickly detect, analyze, contain, and resolve security incidents before they cause major disruption. The following article explains the key...
February 2024 Update – Email Alerting, Email Alerts for Integration Issues and much more
SIGNL4 has already been equipped with several new features this year! For instance, in addition to push notifications, SMS and calls, you can now also receive alerts via email. SIGNL4 will now also send emails if any of your integrations encounter a problem, allowing...
What is an incident?
Terms like ‘incident’ play an important role in understanding IT and OT operations. There is usually an abundance of interpretations and definitions. You will also find different naming conventions with each vendor of tools for monitoring and service management. So,...
What is an alert?
Terms like 'alert' play an important role in understanding IT and OT operations. There is usually an abundance of interpretations and definitions. You will also find different naming conventions with each vendor of tools for monitoring and service management. So,...
What is an event?
Terms like 'event' play an important role in understanding IT and OT operations. There is usually an abundance of interpretations and definitions. You will also find different naming conventions with each vendor of tools for monitoring and service management. So,...
Navigating the IT Maze: A SIGNL4 Journey of Clarity and Efficiency
In the dynamic realm of IT, every alert is a crucial piece of information. As an IT technician, I often found myself lost in the complexity of third-party alerts, grappling with deep-level tech details that felt like a maze. I lost valuable time trying to decipher an...
Are you still using SMS text for alerting?
In the world of IT monitoring and IoT systems, it is crucial to alert users promptly and reliably about critical issues. Whether it's about security and ongoing systems at the workplace, in public facilities, or other places, the way in which alarm notifications are...
How does SIGNL4 provide for truly reliable alerting?
Of course, one expects an alerting solution to be reliable. This is important because a missed alert can have a significant impact on the business. It is about IT uptime, disruptions in production or other critical system conditions. Business processes, production...
After Hours Alerting for ConnectWise: Using SIGNL4 to Route CW Tickets to On-Call Engineers
Article by Doreen Jacobi As a business owner or manager, you understand the importance of efficient operations and effective communication, particularly after hours. You want to equip your on-call engineers with all the information they need to resolve a ticket when...
Revolutionizing your Grafana setup with intelligent alerting
Once upon a time, in the bustling city of DataVille, lived a team of dedicated IT professionals tirelessly working to maintain the city's digital heartbeat. Their mission was to ensure the smooth operation of their city's digital infrastructure, which was not limited...
October 2023 Update – New layout, additional cross links, improved event filtering and much more
Our October update brings a new layout in the web portal, new additional cross-references from Signl details to linked entities, and improved grouping options for conditions in the distribution rules. As always, all the details are in this blog article. Web portal...
How to use the Rest API to manage SIGNL4 categories
SIGNL4 Categories The categories in SIGNL4 are a powerful tool to make it clear to users at first glance what a particular alert is about. For example, colors, icons, location and predefined texts can be configured here. Categories can be created and edited manually....
August 2023 update – calendar export and video attachments in the mobile app
Our August update brings the ability to export shift scheduling from SIGNL4 to other calendar apps. In addition, video attachments are now supported for Signls. As always, all the details are in this blog article. Export duty schedules to external calendar apps From...
July 2023 Update – New user management, Duty stand-ins, incident response in voice-calls and simplified SSO
User July update includes a new and optimized user management in the web portal and a new feature in the duty scheduler, which allows to easily create stand-ins for scheduled duty personnel. Furthermore, it is now possible to acknowledge or close Signls directly...
What is IT Incident Management?
Are you tired of dealing with IT incidents that seem to pop up at the worst possible times? Do you find yourself struggling to keep track of all the moving pieces involved in resolving incidents? If so, it's time to revitalize your incident management strategy. In...
The Ultimate Guide to Automating and Mobilizing Your Secops Processes with Derdack SIGNL4 and Microsoft Sentinel
Article by Doreen Jacobi The threat and security landscape is becoming increasingly cluttered. As incidents increase, so do alerts and notifications, leading to too many alerts and too few hours to address them. Many businesses work remote and with the ever-present...
The Dangers of Alert Fatigue: Strategies for Effective Alert Management
Alert fatigue is a serious issue that affects numerous professions, especially in the IT industry. It can lead to neglecting critical events and delaying response times. IT teams need to continuously monitor their systems and applications to avert possible downtime...
Alarm Notification Software: SIGNL4 is test winner
The renowned German manufacturing magazine "Factory Innovation" recently conducted a comprehensive practical test on four leading alarm notification software for industrial manufacturing in their latest issue (01/23). The four alarming systems that were evaluated...
April 2023 Update – Central integration management with event distribution rules, global API keys and much more
After a longer period without a major update, our April 2023 update has it in for it - promised! Central event distribution Over several months we have implemented a mechanism for central event distribution to various responsible teams. The "magic word" for this is...
Alert Notification Software: 6 Must-Have Features
Alert notification software is an essential tool for IT operations. It enables teams to quickly respond to critical issues and ensure the smooth running of systems and services. With the increasing complexity of IT environments, it is more important than ever to have...
5 tips for a successful on-call duty
On-call availability is crucial for many industries, especially in IT. With the growing reliance on IT systems and services, their availability directly impacts the success and satisfaction of customers. To ensure round-the-clock availability, on-call services are...
Maximizing IT Company Success through Effective On-Call Support
Having your systems monitored by a reliable solution is important, but how do you ensure that the right people are informed about issues that arise? Identifying problems is the first step, but they also need to be routed to the appropriate individuals. Keep in mind...
Alarm optimization – what SIGNL4 has to offer
Having all relevant information pertaining to a critical incident is vital for quickly identifying the issue and prioritize its importance. SIGNL4 optimizes the perception, response and handling of incidents through customizable alerts with enriched parameters,...
Is being on-call a reason to quit?
"Well, that's the job." Have you ever heard that from your colleagues or bosses when it came to being on-call? Imagine you started a new job 3 months ago and were looking forward to it from the start. You are on-call one weekend a month and thought there wouldn't be...
Greenlight Group: Efficient Service Delivery by automating your Incident Response
About Discover our new podcast episode “Efficient Service Delivery by automating your Incident Response”. Doreen Jacobi, CEO of Derdack Corp and Joe Madden, President of Greenlight Group discuss Greenlight’s experience and use cases in implementing SIGNL4. Tune...
August 2022 Update – Change duty status of colleagues, configurable duty notifications and revised password change
Our August update now allows administrators and team administrators to change the service status of other users in the portal. We also made service settings more granular and e.g. introduced the ability to turn off certain push messages when colleagues' service...
Derdack Podcast: Technology and Opportunities for Cybersecurity Service Providers
About Discover our new podcast episode "How CSP Lighthouse uses Microsoft Sentinel and SIGNL4 to successfully operate managed Cybersecurity Services". Matthes Derdack - founder of Derdack and SIGNL4 - talks to our client Callum Golding - founder of CSP Lighthouse, a...
Remote Actions for IT Remediation, IoT Actions and more
SIGNL4 supports the remote execution of automated tasks or workflows in IT or IoT systems using Remote Actions. These remote actions offer a wide range of applications. You can execute remote actions in response to an alert to trigger some kind of remediation action....
July 2022 update – Remote actions for super-fast incident remediation
Our July update ships a very powerful new feature - remote actions. Remote actions are available for execution - once configured - in the SIGNL4 mobile app and allow you to quickly perform remediation actions without having to fire up a notebook and VPN or without...
May 2022 Update 2 – New category features and improved zooming in the scheduler
Our second May update brings partial word matching for category keywords (wildcards), content enrichments for Signls via categories, and an improved zoom level toggle in the duty scheduler. All the details are in this blog article. Fragment search It is now also...
Derdack SIGNL4 Joins Microsoft Intelligent Security Association (MISA)
MISA nomination paves the way for an effective anywhere 24/7 response to security incidents and demonstrates long-term commitment to the Microsoft relationship Richmond, May 1, 2022 Today, Derdack SIGNL4 (www.signl4.com), provider of critical alerting and...
Holiday Import from iCal Files
SIGNL4 helps to reliably alert service technicians in facility management, no matter where they are located.
May 2022 Update – Templates, scheduler enhancements, landline numbers, and more
Our May update brings Signl templates for manual alerting, improvements for duty scheduling and various enhancements in the web portal. Another new feature is the possibility to notify through calling landline numbers. All details can be found in this blog article....
April 2022 Update – Signl categories and duty scheduler improvements
With our April update, we ship some great improvements for Signl categories, category-based alerting and duty scheduling. All details are available in this blog article. Enhanced category matching Category matching can now also be based on text fragments ("keywords")...
Heartbeat check and more – is your monitoring still alive?
SIGNL4 is a cloud-based mobile alerting and incident response service. Third-party systems like monitoring tools, control systems or IoT sensors detect abnormalities and transmit events to SIGNL4 over the Internet. What if your systems cannot transmit critical events...
Feature Update: Enhanced security for call routing
Our interim update from March 15 adds important security features to call forwarding to on-callers. Three new settings have been added for call routing numbers: PIN Allow callers Block callers PIN From now on you can assign a PIN...
February 2022 Update – Centralized and time-based notification patterns
With our February update, it is now possible to centrally configure how Signls should be notified. And of course, each team can have a different configuration of their notification preferences. This also includes response and escalation settings. In addition, it is...
Integration Options with SIGNL4
SIGNL4 integrates with various backend systems like IT monitoring, service management, IoT systems, sensors, etc. to automatically alert users and teams about certain incidents. A list of selected tools along with integration descriptions is available in our...
Scheduling Managers on Duty for Alert Escalation
A question we are hearing often is related to manager escalations, a heavily utilized feature in SIGNL4. Users ask us if those managers can be scheduled. The short answer is 'yes', but you need to use a different feature in SIGNL4 and do a little re-configuration. By...
How to get support?
This post provides an overview on the variety of options and to contact us, if you are seeking technical or other support from the SIGNL4 team. Though, SIGNL4 is designed as a self-service platform and provides an abundance of resources and help, we 'human' provide...
December 2021 Update – On-duty board, Manual Signls and Azure Sentinel update
Our December update brings a 'Who is on duty' board displaying current team members on duty with contact information. In addition, we have simplified the manual sending of Signls and improved the integration with Azure Sentinel. As always, you can find all the details...
A vital alerting solution
This article should give you a first idea of what SIGNL4 does. What do IT security, production monitoring and technical field service have in common? In all these scenarios, the right people need to get notified immediately - in case of technical malfunctions, urgent...
Mobile Service Dispatching for In Plant Transport Logistics at BASF Coatings
„SIGNL4, is a highly intuitive seamless mobile control system for intra-logistics processes. We were looking for an attractive visualization that enables a smooth change management within the teams. Changing process is always a challenge but the greatest sceptics soon...
Publish SIGNL4 oncall and alert information to your Grafana dashboard
Grafana is as open source analytics and interactive visualization application. You can connect different data sources to display chart and graphs or even trigger alerts. Wouldn't it be great to add information about SIGNL4 alerts or about who is on call as part of...
November 2021 Update – Improved incident response with team escalation and more
Our November update introduces new team settings and, along with them, entirely new options for escalating Signls. This will allow you to make your incident response even more reliable. One application is to create a 'managers on duty' teams with full duty scheduling...
