Revamped notifications AND alerts

[KelAuth]

Better control over notifications and alerts

Being notified about possible problems is key to monitoring Internet services. The challenge is finding a balance that prevents too many emails being sent while ensuring the notifications you want are sent. The best solution is to give you finer controls over what you want and don't want to receive.

Up until now, alerts were only available in our Enterprise level service and only notifications were available to OutagesIO.

In the next few days, a new level of notifications will be made available along with alerts for Extended agents reports.

One great feature is that now, both notifications and alerts can be separately controlled.

The current OutagesIO notifications system

Notifications encompass both a possible outage and/or an inactive agent situations. This is done in order to limit the number of emails sent to your inbox. As you have taken the time to sign up, we make the assumption that you want to know about events occurring related to your monitoring. Rather than sending constant emails, a few are sent so that you can log into your dashboard for more information.

You can find out more about agent statuses here;
Howto: Internet outages, alerts and agent statuses

The new notifications page give more control over when you would like to see notification emails. For example, you might want to know every single time your agent is unable to reach the Internet. On the other hand, might want to know only about confirmed outages after the connection is back online.

Basic reports: No change. Inactive will continue being sent and you can control enabling or disabling notifications. Up to three notifications are sent out to prevent spamming your inbox after which, you must manually re-enable inactive notifications.

Extended reports: For agents with Extended reports enabled, alerts are now available.

The purpose behind alerts are to ensure there are acknowledgements of problems and a historical trail of what was done. This can be helpful when multiple people are managing agents are different locations such as an IT support person or MSP and others.

If enabled and if an alert occurs, the agent manager must acknowledge the alert. This changes its status color from red to yellow.

Next, a reason for closing the alert must be entered such as what happened, what was done etc.

Finally, the historical menu list includes a history of alerts, who dealt with each and what was done.

Now you will be able to pick and choose if you would like to see alerts and/or notifications and for which specific events.

If you see an item greyed out, it means it is not available with this type of agent or is only available to business customers.

SMS for example is only available to business customers and only in the US at this time. Internally, the SMS feature is a beta test.

OutagesIO Support