Alert management is essential for monitoring and maintaining IT systems, enabling you to quickly identify problems and take the necessary action to minimize service degradation and disruption. But sometimes, alert management is not as effective as it could be. The real problems that need intervention are often swept away in a sea of alerts.
Whether you’re managing a large enterprise network, or the IT layout for a smaller business, your alert management tool must ensure that each alert lands with the relevant person. And this is just one of the things your alert management tool ought to be doing. Alerting systems require tougher features to support the increasing complexity of most businesses today.
Find out some of the key functionalities that you need but your alert management tool could be lacking.
Application performance assurance
Your alert management tool may be prompt and efficient in sending out alerts. But what about ensuring that all your applications are always performing their best and delivering excellent service quality and user experience? From an alert management perspective, this means monitoring applications continuously to ensure optimal uptime. Monitoring for uptime and availability instead of just outages will improve the overall user experience and resolve many potential issues.
Alert deduplication
Your alert monitoring system will continue to ping your IT team with alerts from different sources, and many of these will be repetitive. The volume of these alerts from disparate tools will eventually reach a point where they undermine the IT team’s ability to properly manage, secure and optimize services for users and customers. Reworking on similar alerts arising will eventually tire out your IT team, making alert de-duplication a critical feature. Eliminating duplicate alerts can help you reduce alert noise by organizing and grouping alerts based on clearly defined deduplication rules.
Alert centralization and smart routing
Ideally, you should be able to pool all alerts in a single centralized location, and smartly route each alert based on expert availability and skillsets. If your alert management tool is directing everything to all members on the team, then the process is inefficient. Your tool must be automated to send alerts to the relevant stakeholders and eliminate the work involved in having to triage these alerts as they pop up. A centralized dashboard will provide real-time situational visibility into every alert, and will allow you to organize alerts by event topic, track alert history and resolve alerts with more efficiency.
Alert automation
Is your alert management tool able to automate alerts using rule-based algorithms? Alert automation will allow users to configure their own escalation policies based on availability, without having to dedicate IT resources to maintain efficient monitoring systems and processes. It becomes easier to reduce response time and quickly fix problems before they cause downtime or delays. Ultimately the benefits are not restricted to the IT team. Alert automation helps streamline business operations, increase efficiency and enhance productivity.
Anytime, anywhere alerting
Your employees are mobile now and should be able to do their job from anywhere. The alert management tool should enable notifications via multiple channels like secure email, SMS, mobile push and phone calls. Pick a system that allows alert reporting and status to be communicated in multiple ways, and gives IT managers full visibility, and enables them to check the schedule and assign alerts based on scheduling and availability for the fastest incident response.
Open APIs and easy integrations
Your alert management solution should have a publicly available API allowing developers with programmatic access to the software application or web service so they can integrate it with their inhouse solutions and build a fully integrated and automated alert response workflow.
Automated workflows
Inefficient workflows impact the ability to respond to alerts. Your tool should allow you to configure and send information appropriately at every step of the process. Alert data can be provided automatically to everyone who needs it, allowing quicker and better decisions, and reducing the potential for time-consuming and costly business disruptions.
Alert prioritization
Any enterprise environment will quickly generate hundreds, or even thousands, of alerts, so having a filtering and suppression capability in your alert management software is a must. This feature dramatically improves alert-handling efficiency by avoiding information overload and saturation. If high and low priority alerts are mixed together on your monitoring dashboards, the clutter will make it harder to spot alerts that need urgent attention. Alert filters ensure that your team does not spend unnecessary time on low priority alerts by suppressing alerts for low-priority events, rather than disabling them entirely.
Conclusion
Enterprise environments are both extremely complex and agile, which means your alert management software will need to be equally – at the least – efficient and flexible. By making sure your alert management tool has all the essential capabilities, you will ensure that you are maximizing your IT team’s time, addressing issues before they get out of hand, and providing a solid support for business continuity. You can prevent alert fatigue by reducing their workload and help give them more time for higher-value work.