Modern IT Alerting

How IT Alerting works with SIGNL4

SIGNL4 takes events from your IT monitoring and other IT systems, and delivers alerts automatically to the right people at the right time – by mobile app, push, text, voice calls and email. With tracking, acknowledgements, escalations and duty management.

Never miss an alert

Automated IT Alerting

SIGNL4 notifies by app push, text, email and voice calls with tracking, acknowledgements and automated escalations. Fully automated and targeted alert notifications ensure alerts get to responsible IT engineers on duty/on call. SIGNL4 filters relevant and critical alerts to prevent alert fatigue.

Summary

SIGNL4 is a cloud-based IT alerting software designed to streamline the delivery of critical alerts from IT systems to the right on-call staff. It ensures reliable and real-time notifications via push, SMS, voice calls, and emails. The platform integrates with over 175 IT monitoring and management tools, includes on-call scheduling, and offers escalation workflows to ensure no alert is missed. SIGNL4 reduces downtime, enhances response times, and improves operational efficiency, making it an essential tool for 24/7 IT incident management. It automates workflows, enabling efficient monitoring of IT infrastructure.

Insights

What is IT Alerting?

IT alerting refers to the automated notification of responsible persons or teams about IT faults, incidents or deviations from defined threshold values. The aim is to react quickly to problems (mean-time-to-respond) in order to minimize the impact on business operations and resolve small and medium-sized disruptions at an early stage before they become a real crisis or emergency. Alerting can take various forms, e.g. via emails, text messages, phone calls or push notifications. 

Why is IT Alerting relevant for my systems?
 

• Minimization of downtimes: Faster response times mean that unexpected outages and faults can be resolved quickly.
• Improved efficiency: Automated alert notifications reduce manual monitoring and give IT teams more time for other tasks.
• Proactive action: IT alerting allows potential problems to be identified before they cause major damage.
• Increased customer satisfaction: Fast problem resolution ensures uninterrupted service, which improves the customer experience and service quality.

How does IT alerting work?

IT alerting is based on monitoring systems that continuously monitor the performance and availability of IT systems. The market for these tools is huge. Solutions such as Checkmk, Icinga, PRTG, Zabbix and many others can be found here. As soon as a defined threshold value is exceeded or an error occurs, an IT monitoring solution can trigger an alert. This happens in three steps: 

1. Detection: A monitoring system identifies a deviation or incident.
2. Notification: An automated message is sent to the responsible persons or teams.
3. Response: The recipients analyze and rectify the problem.

Insights

How SIGNL4 IT Alerting solves common problems in IT operations and monitoring

Immediate incident response as a key factor in IT Alerting

Of course, it is important that especially critical IT alerts are processed promptly. Even small problems can quickly lead to major failures. Email and dashboards are often the means of choice, as they are brought along by the monitoring tool. However, you need to be aware of the limits of these two methods and IT alerting with SIGNL4 can help here:

• Location-independent attention-grabbing: Dashboards require constant attention and/or appropriate access, e.g. a PC/monitor. The employees’ freedom of movement is restricted. IT alerting via smartphone, call and SMS by SIGNL4 ensures greater flexibility and mobility.
• Email for alerting has several disadvantages: Email alerting is not very concise. Important alert have the same relevance in a mailbox as an Amazon delivery notification. Tracking (alert acknowledged, resolved or not) is difficult to cumbersome. And assigned responsibility for an incident (takeover by a colleague) is also difficult. SIGNL4 provides a remedy here. Alerts can be acknowledge for clear ownership. Signaling can be adjusted to the severity and other parameters. The status of an alert can be viewed directly, updates are provided in real time.

Temporary alerts and Alert floods in IT Alerting

A big classic, which usually leads to important alerts being ignored, overlooked, or overheard when it really counts. SIGNL4 offers effective ways to manage alert floods and generally to keep the number of alerts at bay. Customers confirm that it can reduce the number of false alarms by up to 95%.

• Alerts can be filtered. Distribution rules in SIGNL4 include a powerful filter system allowing to parse content and parameters of incoming data and events (messages from monitoring systems). If the required data are not included, an event is not processed and an alert is not transmitted or triggered.
• Notification profiles in SIGNL4 can be used to control how actionable alerts are signaled. You can create multiple alert categories with different ways of signaling and visualization.
• Distribution rules can also be used to send alerts exclusively to specific teams or team members according to their responsibilities and capabilities.
• Particularly in network environments, there are often brief equipment downtimes or sensor signals that auto-resolve after a few seconds. Such alerts can cause a lot of work and require unnessary attention, because it takes a lot of effort to track the validity of such alerts.
• SIGNL4 can also process a monitoring alert in a third party system via 2-way connectors and its REST API.  This means that when an alarm reset occurs in the monitoring system, the alarm is also set to closed in SIGNL4 and alert notifications are stopped. At the same time, the alert remains visible in the log for later analysts.

Handling after-hours alerts

There is a high likeliness of important alerts occuring outside normal business hours. How do you make sure these alerts are not overlooked while keeping employees happy? Sending them to a whole team during nighttime is not a sensible way to do this. Operating a 24/7 NOC is expensive and reserved for large companies. On-call services are a good option, but need a tool like SIGNL4.

• SIGNL4 was developed with IT on-call duty in mind. The integrated, very convenient scheduling of duty times in the browser allows automatic routing to the respective active on-call person (or several) without bothering other employees in their spare time.
• Alerting via multiple channels (push, SMS and call) as well as repeated signaling until acknowledged ensures high reliability when reacting to an important alarm.
• SIGNL4’s comprehensive escalation feature also ensures that alarms are received after all if the on-call person missed the notifications. This is achieved through multi-level escalation within a team or across multiple teams.

Fast remediation

Ultimately, it is also important to solve problems quickly.

• SIGNL4 offers the so-called “remote actions”, i.e. the execution of IT automation scripts (“runbooks”) directly in response to an alarm. SIGNL4 uses HTTP calls to IT automation tools such as Azure Runbooks, and can then execute these runbooks from the mobile app. This way the troubleshooting and problem solving can even be done from the soccer stadium as a customer assured us.