OnPage: Making sure alerts get noticed with Email Redundancy feature

We realize that alerting is stressful. Whether you are working in Ops, Dev, NOC, helpdesk or on-call, you never want to miss a critical alert because so much rests on making sure that critical incidents are cataloged, heard and acted upon. Every minute that impaired technology persists results in downtime, which in turn hurts an organization’s operational performance.  According to recent statistics, 98% of organizations put the real cost of a single hour of downtime at over $100,000

With these costs in mind, OnPage does everything it can to ensure engineers using the OnPage app are able to receive IT notifications as quickly as possible. That’s why at OnPage, we are very proud of our most recent update to our platform which provides email redundancy to the console. With this functionality, engineers are able to further minimize the opportunity for alerts to slip by.

How the redundancy works

In a typical scenario, the on-call engineer will receive the email alert if they do not answer the OnPage alert before the redundancy kicks in. That is, if the on-call engineer receives an OnPage smartphone alert and doesn’t respond within the amount of time determined by the delay shown in Figure 1, they will receive an email redundancy. In the email redundancy, the on-call engineer will receive the contents of the OnPage alert in an email. The engineer can then respond to engineer via email or through the OnPage app.

If the email redundancy is enabled but the engineer answers the OnPage alert on their smartphone before the time elapses for the email to kick in, the on-call engineer will not receive the email. In this scenario, the email redundancy will be short circuited.

If the administrator has set up an escalation policy whereby the critical notification escalates before the email redundancy kicks in, the initial on-call engineer could theoretically answer the alert via their smartphone app or email redundancy and stop the escalation policy from continuing.

Use case

Many of OnPage’s clients have requested the email redundancy feature. We were happy to answer their request and provide them with this capability. For these clients, the scenario they were experiencing was one where they might one day forget their smartphone at home. If they forget their smartphone at home, there really is no way for them to receive the OnPage alert on their smartphone.

However, with the email redundancy feature enabled, the on-call engineer will receive a redundant email alert letting them know that there is an important issue they need to attend to. With this information on their email client, the engineer can respond to the alert and continue to answer critical requests.

If the admin does not set a time delay to the redundancy, the on-call engineers will receive the OnPage smartphone alert at the same time that they receive an email, SMS and phone alert.

How do I make sure I get this functionality?

If you have an OnPage Gold or Silver subscription, you will automatically have access to the email redundancy feature. No need to change anything. If you only use the OnPage application but would like access to the email redundancy feature, contact our Sales team and they will help you establish an enterprise account.

As a Gold or Silver member, you can enable the email redundancy feature when you log into the OnPage console. In the box to the right of ‘Always send redundancy:’ check Email and indicate the delay time interval.  Then, hit Submit to ensure your changes are saved. See Figure 1 above for an illustration.

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If you have any questions about how to use the email redundancy feature, please do not hesitate to contact our fabulous support team. Additionally, if YOU (I mean you) have any features you would like us to implement please send us an email.