OnPage Integration with Microsoft Outlook Email

How to play by the rules

Email integration has been our bread and butter since we started the company in 2011. As such, we think it important to explain how using the powerful, dependable and reliable logic inherent in Microsoft Office’s email platform, allows you to easily set up a framework to get notified in OnPage in case of an alert.

First rules first

According to a 2015 report, Microsoft Office 365 products are used by 4 out of 5 Fortune 500 companies. That’s a huge number of companies using Outlook. So with every monitoring system on the planet having the ability to send email, your ability to send emails to your Outlook account is ensured.

Assume you are an Ops engineer tasked with monitoring your company’s servers. You want to know when a server is experiencing an error. Do you want to sit around and wait and watch? Of course not. You have better things to do like write a better script or save the DevOps world. So, what if you could create a simple rule in Outlook to let you know anytime a server is experiencing a critical error?

A rosy Microsoft Outlook

Using Outlook’s inherent rules, you can create notifications that allow you to forward alerts from Outlook to your OnPage account based on any device that sends email.

Route the High Priority alert to [email protected]
Route the Low Priority call line to [email protected]

That means any IoT, monitor or security alert can be sent via email to Outlook. And using Outlook’s logic, you could forward that email to your OnPage account on any or all of the following conditions:

When you get an email message from a server e.g. server123@company_servers.com
When you get a message from a server with specific words in the subject of the email e.g. Subject: Error message
When you get a message from a server with specific words in the body of the email
When you get a message from a server with specific words in the sender’s address e.g. server123_alert@company_servers.com
If you get a message from a server or any other server listed in a specified Address Book

There are also several more conditions that can be invoked based on your needs and set-up. For example, you can also set up alerts to be forwarded to OnPage based on the sensitivity or importance of the email as defined by the sender.

Testing the rules

I tested all these conditions (and more) using my Google email and OnPage Outlook account. It never took more than 40 seconds from the time the email was sent until the time I received the alert on my OnPage account. See some of the results below:

Function tested	Time to Outlook	Time to OnPage after email sent
An alert on any email sent from [email protected]	16 seconds	40 seconds
Alert on the specific words ‘critical alert’ in the subject	14 seconds	35 seconds
Alert on the specific words ‘critical alert’ in the body	7 seconds	26 seconds
Alert on the specific word ‘orlee’ in the sender’s email	17 seconds	37 seconds

Conclusion

The rapid exchange of information shown in the experiment above demonstrates the powerful and dependable nature of both Outlook and OnPage. I can feel confident that any email alert sent by a server monitor, IoT or cybersecurity software can be forwarded to my OnPage account quickly and reliably.

Indeed, the outlook does look very rosy.

OnPage is cloud-based incident alerting and management platform that elevates notifications on your smartphone so they continue to alert until read. Incidents can be programmed to arrive to the person on-call and can be escalated if they are not attended to promptly. Schedule a demonstration today!