There are three levels of action in any IT system. For proactive maintenance, you need to have alerts when certain thresholds are approaching. The user needs to be alerted in advance of any situation where they may lose their work. For example, in Diagnostics there is a datastore growth monitor which will allow you to prevent problematic situations.
Next are anomalies. These are unpredictable conditions that can arise in any work situation. By having automated alerts in place, these anomalies can be processed quickly. If you are unaware of anomalies, you cannot act. In cases like this, the IT system will alert your sysadmin staff to the anomaly so that it can be resolved before being noticed by your clients / users.
Finally, there is dealing with internal breakdowns which can happen when the end-user raises a ticket for the errors or tracebacks that they have experienced. This is something that could be prevented through system alerts.
All of these levels can use notification tools, however, the first two action levels receive the most benefit from automated notifications.
The easiest way to use notifications is by sending automated emails to the software maintenance staff to act upon. For example, your end users are thrown out of the database due to unforeseen problems in your infrastructure. They will receive a “datastore_not_initialised” fatal notification on their workstations or Citrix sessions.
Diagnostics can notify you of this condition as soon as it happens in near real-time. You can configure an alert to send out an email as soon as users start getting this condition.
Is email the best notification tool?
Most email inboxes fill up extremely quickly and are therefore not suited to receiving multiple notifications. When in a meeting, most people ignore their emails because they want to concentrate on the meeting.
An email can be left unattended for more than an hour, and possibly many hours in some instances. Conclusion: Email notifications would fail for most businesses and their users.
Other Notifications
What other types of notification methods are available? You can use SMS texting or choose specialised tools for this purpose in the market, such as pushover, prowl etc. You can also consider messenger apps like Telegram or MS Teams.
Too Technical
Diagnostics leverages the functionality of Splunk under the hood. Splunk has a huge app store with apps available to connect to third-party notification tools. It is also possible to write an app yourself…
Too Simple
Some further investigation on how to circumvent this app solution and avoid the “under the hood solutions” brought us to this insight: Most services allow you to send an email!
Prowl, for example, makes it possible to send messages to @api.prowlapp.com. In a similar light, MS Teams allow you to send messages to channels within MS Teams.
Conclusion
There are easy ways to get ahead of the issues that your end-users may experience on your website or platform. For example, you can configure your Diagnostics to send an alert message directly to a specific service provider within your organisation, from your favourite notification app. We recommend choosing a notification or alert type that forces you to take action. Get in touch with Realworld Systems to find out more.
