4 IT Challenges Addressed by OnPage Automated Alerting

IT organizations are challenged with delivering quick, effective resolution to customers’ database, hardware or software downtime issues. Contractually binding service-level agreements (SLAs) place further pressure on IT engineers to accelerate incident resolution time and minimize downtime. Though engineers are obligated to meet their SLAs, they are unable to do so without the help of an automated alerting system.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss how OnPage’s automated alerting system helps relieve four workplace challenges for IT organizations, plus detail how engineers can meet their SLAs using incident response automation. 

Defining an Automated Alerting System

An automated alerting platform can help relieve workplace obstacles, such as alert fatigue and burnout, to ensure that engineers always meet their SLAs. The entire automated alerting system consists of a secure, two-way mobile messaging application and a dynamic web management console.

Authorized users with access to the system’s web console can configure on-call team schedules and escalations. Based on how schedules are configured, the right on-call engineer automatically receives an immediate, real-time mobile alert detailing the customer’s issue. Incident response automation gives on-call engineers the means to deliver immediate fixes to complex issues.

OnPage Is a Leading Automated Alerting System

OnPage’s automated alerting platform for IT enables organizations to get the most out of their digital investments. OnPage modernizes the incident response process and increases the productivity of on-call engineers through: 

• Encrypted, real-time mobile messaging with persistent alerts that bypass the mute switch
• Digital, fail-proof on-call schedules and rotations
• Configurable escalation and failover policies
• Automated high or low-priority mobile alerts
• Audit trails, presence statuses and post-incident reports

OnPage empowers IT teams to have an automated and orchestrated response to critical, time-sensitive customer issues. By automating incident response with OnPage, IT organizations can alleviate the following four workplace challenges:

1. Alert fatigue and burnout
2. Flooded email inboxes
3. Human error
4. Disjointed team communication

1. Alert Fatigue and Burnout

Alert fatigue describes when an engineer is exhausted from receiving an excessive, overwhelming amount of actionable and non-actionable alerts. Fatigue leads to burnout as engineers put time and effort into resolving all event notifications. These workplace challenges conjointly decrease employee happiness, productivity and satisfaction.

OnPage minimizes alert fatigue by filtering out unimportant notifications and helping IT teams prioritize incidents. High-priority alerts are informative, loud and persistent messages that bypass the silent switch and require immediate attention. Low-priority alerts are used for casual communications and do not require immediate response from an on-call engineer. Prioritized alerting helps engineers focus on the notifications that matter.

IT support managers can log in to the OnPage web management console to balance workloads and minimize burnout across on-call teams. Based on digital schedule configurations, OnPage only notifies the designated on-call engineer when an incident happens.

2. Flooded Email Inboxes

Email is an inadequate means to manage an incident as it buries important, high-priority notifications under irrelevant messages. Email does not offer loud, prioritized alarms that notify engineers about the severity of an inbox message. Engineers that rely on email often miss critical alerts and are unable to provide quick, effective incident response for customers. 

The OnPage automated alerting system turns ordinary email alerts into robust, reliable critical messages. Organizations can connect OnPage with any email provider to start sending distinguishable and loud mobile alerts to on-call engineers. Unlike email, OnPage mobile alerts rise above the clutter and ensure that on-call engineers never miss or ignore a critical message. High-priority notifications can override the mute switch on all smartphone devices.

3. Human Error

Team leaders control and manage many aspects of the incident management process, such as delegating work across on-call response teams. However, without an automated alerting solution, leaders must spend time manually performing all incident management tasks. This continuous, manual process causes fatigue for team leaders and often results in human error.

OnPage streamlines incident management workflows to help alleviate the pressure of managing an on-call engineering team. For instance, OnPage’s automation capabilities make scheduling a fast, error-free process for team leaders. Automated, digital on-call scheduling is key to ensuring seamless delivery of IT services.

The OnPage automated alerting system offers two-way integrations with third-party ticketing solutions, such as ConnectWise Manage and ServiceNow. Ticket statuses can be updated with the simple click of a button from the OnPage mobile application. This eliminates human error, saves time and provides immediate updates on the status of a support ticket.

4. Disjointed Team Communication

The inability to seamlessly communicate with colleagues creates inevitable barriers to incident response management. Emails and text messages do not provide unified, real-time communications for IT response teams. Ineffective means of communication prevents engineers from understanding who is managing an incident and how close they are in resolving the customer’s issue.

On-call teams require OnPage’s secure, real-time mobile messaging application. The app delivers visual representation of contacts’ presence statuses, and it offers unified, chat-like views into team communications. Engineers can even “reply all” to messages so the entire incident team sees the message. OnPage enhances response team communication and collaboration to improve how on-call groups operate. 

Conclusion

OnPage automated alerting modernizes and streamlines the entire event resolution process for on-call engineers, and it addresses some of the key challenges faced by today’s IT industry. The 21st century solution powers incident management, allowing IT engineers to drive customer experience, organizational growth and revenue.