I wanted to open a discussion around alerting with all of you who have a hand in it - which is pretty much all of us.
I'm running into some perceived walls; I have a pretty firm expectation that alert = action.
So if you want "need" an alert for something - it signifies someone needs to do something and even if they don't - someone is darn sure going to acknowledge that alert and if we're being collaborative; add a quick reference note to it.
Whereas I'm currently working and interacting with some new individuals and teams that are very firmly in the mindset, that an alert = reminder or is strictly informational because - it can do that.
I'm interested in hearing what your stance is or ideas about:
- What you do and how with alerts?
- Are you categorizing them?
- Are they just informational emails?
- Are they going in your NetPerfMon Log (Please sweet Gods of Network Monitoring tell me you do this)
- Do they have actions that "fix" or start the "fixing" of a known bad condition?
- Who gets alerts?
- Internal customers?
- External customers?
- How are those different; by what they look like and the expectation of who'd doing what when they receive them?
- What is the purpose of an "alert" as it is today?
- Notification of an element or component or nodes' undesirable condition?
- Is action always required or are Information-Only alerts ok?
- Actions that resolve an issue?
- How do we satisfy these expectations of seemingly passive information sharing?
- Aggressive scheduled reporting?
- Telling them to log in an look?
- Mobile Admin Push Notifications?
- Some kind of integration with your service ticketing/work-order management systems for "follow-up" items?
I'm interested to hear what you geeks have to say about it!