Even though most IT teams have adopted IT alerting practices, they are often far from monitoring and alerting best practices. It’s not enough to just have an alerting tool. Like a monitoring tool, if left uncalibrated, alerts will simply produce a sea of noisy data. Instead, teams should calibrate alerts so that they are meaningful.
For example, a meaningful alert might be something along the line of web requests are taking more than x seconds to process and respond or new servers are failing to spin up as expected. And these are great examples of what could be high priority alerts for a company.
Alternatively, alerts that are less high priority, such as server is 90% full can be a low priority alert that can be forwarded to the on call engineer but don’t rise to the level of a 2am wakeup call. In OnPage, you can send this low priority alert to go to the engineer’s account but ensure the account notifies the engineer during normal business hours.
It’s an important realization that not all alerting needs to wake up an engineer. The trick to successful alerting is to provide meaningful alerts when issues do occur. To this end, OnPage has the following alerting best practices which have been vetted by our numerous end users:
By following these steps your team will begin the process towards thinking from a proactive rather than a reactive position.
For more information…
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