Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
14.1.7 Types of Notifications
There are many levels of urgency at which monitoring and other services need to raise the
attention of human operators. Only the most urgent is an alert.
Each level of urgency should have its own communication method. If urgent alerts are
simply sent to someone's email inbox, they may not be noticed in time. If non-urgent mes-
sages are communicated by sending an SMS to the person oncall, the “Boy Who Cried
Wolf” syndrome will develop.
The best option is to build a very high-level classification system:
•
Alert Oncall:
The SLA is in violation, or if a condition is detected that, if left un-
attended, will result in an SLA violation.
•
Create a Ticket:
The issue needs attention within one business day.
•
Log to a File:
The condition does not require human attention. We do not want to
lose the information, but we do not need to be notified.
•
Do Nothing:
There is no useful information; nothing should be sent.
In some organizations, all of these situations are communicated by email to the entire sys-
tem administration team. Under these conditions, all team members might be compelled to
filter all messages to a folder that is ignored. This defeats the purpose of sending the mes-
sages in the first place.
Email is, quite possibly, the worst alerting mechanism. Expecting someone to sit and
watch an email inbox is silly, and a waste of everyone's time. With this strategy, staff will
be unaware of new alerts if they step away or get involved in other projects.
Daily emails that report on the result of a status check are also a bad idea. If the status
is fine, log this fact. If a problem was detected, automatically open a ticket. This prevents
multiple people from accidentally working on the same issue at the same time. If the prob-
lem is urgent enough that someone should be alerted immediately, then why is the check
being done only once per day? Instead, report the status to the monitoring system fre-
quently and send alerts normally.
However, it is a good idea to use email as a secondary mechanism. That is, when send-
ingamessagetoapagerorcreatingaticket,alsoreceivingacopyviaemailisuseful.Many
systems have mechanisms to subscribe to such messages in a way that permits precise fil-
tering.Forexample,itisusuallypossibletoconfigureaticketsystemtoemailnotifications
of new or updated tickets in a particular queue.
Once an alert is triggered, there are many ways to notify the person who is oncall. The
most common alert methods are identified here:
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