Mobile alerting with tracking & escalation for Google Cloud's Operations Suite (formerly Stackdriver)
Why SIGNL4
Google Cloud’s Operations Suite is a cloud-based systems management service offering performance and diagnostics data to public cloud users.
It provides access to logs, metrics, traces, and other signals from infrastructure platforms, virtual machines, containers, middleware, etc. with the objective to track issues all the way from the end user to backend services and infrastructure. Pairing this Google Cloud’s Operations Suite with SIGNL4 can enhance your daily operations with an extension to your mobile team in the field or on the shop floor.
How it Works
In order to pair Google Cloud’s Operations Suite and SIGNL4, you can use the alerting capabilities in Google Cloud’s Operations Suite. Here you can configure the SIGNL4 webhook and whenever there is an alert it is then forwarded to SIGNL4.
Integration Capabilities
- IT staff is alerted via mobile push, text and voice
- Staff can acknowledge and take ownership for critical events that occur
- Alerts are escalated in case of no response
- Communicate within an alert to address a particular problem
- Inbound webhook and email establishes connection from Google Cloud’s Operations Suite to a SIGNL4 team
- On-call scheduling to alert the right people at the right time
Scenarios
- IT status forwarding
- Industrial Data
- DevOps
Tickets and Incidents are sent to SIGNL4
Event categorization, routing and automated delivery
Persistent Notifications by push, text and voice call with Tracking, Escalation and Confirmation to Staff on Duty
HOW TO INTEGRATE
Gathering events from IoT devices and sending team alerts in case of critical incidents is a broad field. It starts with simple prototypes using a Raspberry Pi and goes up to industrial IoT scenarios, machine data or distributed systems in the field.
The following example demonstrates the whole flow from an event on a device, through Google IoT Core and then notifying an engineer using SIGNL4.
SIGNL4 is a mobile alert notification app for powerful alerting, alert management and mobile assignment of work items. Get the app at https://www.signl4.com.
Cloud IoT Core is a fully managed service that allows you to easily and securely manage and connect your IoT devices. The integration with SIGNL4 is straightforward. In the following we will show an example on how to send alert notifications using SIGNL4 in case of MQTT events coming from devices in the field.
Prerequisites
- A SIGNL4 account
- Access to the Google Cloud’s Operations Suite (https://console.cloud.google.com)
First of all go to your workspace in Google Cloud’s Operations Suite or create a new one at https://app.google.stackdriver.com.
Go to Workspace Settings -> Notifications -> Webhooks and create a new Webhook.
Here you just need to enter your SIGNL4 webhook URL. The is the specific team secret of your SIGNL4 team.
Click Test Connection to test the connection. You should then receive a SIGNL4 alert on your phone.
Here you just need to enter your SIGNL4 webhook URL. The is the specific team secret of your SIGNL4 team.
Click Test Connection to test the connection. You should then receive a SIGNL4 alert on your phone.
In the Google Cloud’s Operations Suite console go to Alerting -> Alerting Policies and then click Add Policy.
Here you can specify the conditions on when to send the alert. And you can add Your Notification Channel. For the latter you can select Webhook with Token Authentication and then select the SIGNL4 notification channel you have configured in the previous step.
Then you can specify a name for the notification and click Save.
Ready to Go
This is it and now you will receive SIGNL4 alerts for any events and incidents matching your conditions.
If you would like to simulate event data you can do so for example using MQTT as descrived here: https://github.com/signl4/signl4-integration-google-iot.
You can also find the information at GitHub: https://github.com/signl4/signl4-integration-google-stackdriver
ALERT OPTIMIZATION
SIGNL4 can further increase the visibility of alerts through its Signals and Services section. Augmenting the color and icon of alerts will provide more relevant information at a glance without having to open the alert.
Change alert color and override title + text
Override text, colors and titles are triggered by keywords set within the mobile app.