IT Alerting System

Read Guide Learn More

What’s an IT Alerting System?

Alerting systems centralize all alerts into one intuitive platform. They integrate with your tooling stack and provide alert controls that help teams increase efficiency and reduce false positives.

The main functions of an IT alerting platform include activating incident response, automating alerts, providing intuitive reports, and enabling quick communication between roles. To enable these functions, alerting solutions should be designed with quality in mind, rather than quantity.

IT Alerting System

Functions of The System

A robust alerting system does more than simply make teams aware of alerts. Alert notification systems centralize information and streamline processes to help manage IT teams efficiently. Alerting systems accomplish this in several ways.

Further, a robust IT alerting system is complemented by an emergency mass notification system, allowing organizations to broadcast high-priority alerts during times of crisis or whenever urgent, mass alerting is needed.

Alerting Design Principles

When implementing an alerting system, there are several design aspects that you should consider. These aspects can help you ensure that your system is operating effectively and that alerts are as functional and helpful as possible.

Some aspects to consider include:

Quality over quantity—You should focus on creating limited policies that prioritize high-risk issues and combinations of events that point to a likely issue.
Create actionable pages—any time you send an alert it should include information that is meaningful and requires action.
Broadcast informational items with mass notifications—while not everyone should be responding to a single alert, there are often times when you need your whole team to be aware of an event. In these cases, you should distribute information in a broadcast alert (i.e., mass notifications).
Determine if upstream dependencies are actionable or informational—upstream dependencies can disrupt your systems and services but you often have no control over these issues. If you can do something to mitigate the issue an alert makes sense but if you can’t you should send a broadcast instead.
Prioritize notifications sent by humans—ideally, any time a human sends an alert or notification to others, it is likely to contain either more complex or more instructive information than a system can provide. You should prioritize any alerts initiated by humans to ensure the content is seen.
Invest in alerting automation—automation can significantly ease the burden on your IT team, enabling them to focus on responding to issues rather than notifying others or documenting actions.

IT alerting

Complete OnPage System

OnPage System Features

OnPage provides an award-winning incident alert management platform. OnPage’s alerting solution provides persistent, intrusive audible notifications until addressed on mobile by the assigned on-call recipient.

OnPage eliminates alert fatigue through high-priority alerting, easily distinguishable from every other mobile notification. This way, the tasked recipient will always know the severity of an alert and the need for an incident’s immediate resolution.

A key advantage of OnPage’s alerting platform is its live event notifications feature, which provides real-time alerts for critical events.

Here’s how the OnPage process works:

The system recognizes a predefined event.
The system sends alerts with an intrusive, loud, Alert-Until-Read notification to the mobile device. There’s a low chance of missing or ignoring this type of alert.
If you miss an Alert-Until-Read notification, it will escalate to another team member.
As a method of redundancy, alerts can also be sent as SMS, email or phone call.