Mobile alerting with tracking & escalation for Healthchecks.io
Why SIGNL4
When critical systems fail, SIGNL4 is the fastest way to alert your staff, engineers, IT admins on call and “in the field”. SIGNL4 provides reliable notifications via mobile app push, text and voice calls with tracking, escalations and duty scheduling.
Healthchecks.io is an open-source con-job and heartbeat monitoring service for various IT and IoT use cases. It monitors is certain scheduled processes are running correctly or if certain systems are available. This can be scheduled backups, virus scans, batch jobs as well as status information from IoT sensors. It is even possible to monitor the availability of monitoring tools themselves. SIGNL4 easily enables Healthcheck.io to notify mobile teams in the field or on call in real-time. This speeds up their response significantly and frees resources in the operations.
Pairing Healthcheks.io with SIGNL4 can enhance your daily operations with an extension to your team wherever it is. The integration does not only allow you to know when a critical issue has occurred but also when it was resolved no matter where you are.
How it Works
Healthcheck.io compatibility allows you to distribute operational alerts to a mobile SIGNL4 team by using a ready-made plugin. Persistent notifications and acknowledgement requirements ensure that issues will be handled before it is too late.
Integration Capabilities
- IT staff is alerted via mobile push, SMS text and voice call
- 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 or email establishes connection from Healthchecks.io to SIGNL4
- On-call scheduling to alert the right people at the right time
- Get recovery information as well
Scenarios
- Scheduled jobs
- System Monitoring
- Application Monitoring
- Network Monitoring
- Database Monitoring
- IoT device status
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
The integration of Healthchecks.io and SIGNL4 is done using the Webhook in Healthchecks.io. In our example we send an HTTP request (ping) from a device at regular intervals. If this request is missing, an alarm should be sent to our SIGNL4 team.
Prerequisites
A SIGNL4 account (https://www.signl4.com)
A Healthcheck.io account (https://healthchecks.io)
Go to Healthchecks.io and add a check.
This gives you an URL where you can send your requests to. Optionally, you can also send emails.
Now you go to Integrations and add a new Webhook integration. For the URL you choose POST and enter your SIGNL4 webhook URL including your team secret.
As Request Body you enter the JSON content representing your alert data. You can use $NAME, $STATUS as placeholders.
When you enter the above for the “down” event you will receive the alerts when an issue is detected. You can also use the “up” event to automatically close the alert in SIGNL4 when the issue is resolved.
Therefore, you need to use some additional parameters as described here: https://www.signl4.com/blog/update-july-2020-resolve-alerts/.
For the “down” and “up” events you need to specify the same “X-S4-ExternalId”. This can be a unique ID for this specific check. And, for the “up” event you need to specify “X-S4-Status” to be “resolved”.
That is it and now you can test the alert. You can for example simulate an alert by sending the HTTP request (Ping) from your web browser. If you do not do this for a time period longer than the one you specified for the check you will receive an alert in your SIGNL4 app.
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.