Zen Your Life With IT Event Noise Reduction

IT incident responders have been inundated with alerts since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. These engineers must dig through their messages to collect and respond to real alerts for real critical events. This process wastes time and prolongs incident response. The objective is to focus on IT event noise reduction to recognize and resolve real incidents promptly.

This blog post discusses: 

• How the pandemic continues to impact on-call responders
• The impact of incident alert noise on customer experience
• The impact of IT alert noise on on-call engineers
• Overcoming pandemic challenges with IT event noise reduction
• How to zen your life with OnPage IT alerting

The Pandemic Continues to Impact On-Call Responders

Critical IT incidents do not stop for the pandemic. Responders continue to be flooded with high and low-priority alerts from different sources. Engineers that are trying to survive the pandemic, are now also battling IT alert noise and alert fatigue.

In-office meetings, which were once an effective way to communicate, are no longer possible with engineers now working remotely. The only solution is to discuss issues over video conference, which may be unfamiliar territory for some. Engineers must be familiar with video conferencing to collaborate and communicate with colleagues.

Work-from-home staff may also moonlight as tutors for their children. Interruptions at home may reduce one’s work efficiency and productivity. Considering the challenges, more IT teams are embracing digital transformation at an unprecedented speed and scale. Digital strategies are being updated to bring more efficiency to existing processes and enable greater flexibility to work from home. 

In the following sections, we will uncover how incident alert noise and alert fatigue impact stakeholders.   

The Impact of Incident Alert Noise on Customer Experience

Based on our findings, work-from-home engineers are experiencing a spike in incidents. Without increasing headcount, IT teams are taking longer to resolve a large number of critical events. This has directly impacted service level agreements (SLAs), sometimes leading to high customer churn and dissatisfaction. 

The Impact of IT Alert Noise on On-Call Engineers

The more complex an IT infrastructure is, the more time is spent on responding to false-positive alerts. These alerts are mislabeled and indicate that real incidents are present, but in actuality, they are not.

By spending time and effort on false positives, on-call engineers are unable to respond to real alerts or deliver on key projects promptly. The impact of incident alert noise transcends resolution speed. Alert noise desensitizes engineers to the point where critical alerts are overlooked or wrongly classified as false positives. 

Experiencing alert noise leads to alert fatigue in on-call personnel. The resulting cognitive overload can paralyze rational thinking and lead to missed critical alerts, or at times, incorrect remedies.

Overcoming Pandemic Challenges

When an incident occurs, IT teams aim to accelerate the triage process to ensure business continuity for the client. Teams can achieve this by having a robust incident management workflow. An effective workflow can ingest alerts from monitoring systems, cybersecurity tools and ticketing solutions. It must then immediately notify the on-call engineer to ensure quick incident resolution.

IT teams must also focus on event noise reduction. As mentioned, noisy, unactionable alerts increase the chance of missing real notifications. The solution is to assign and classify unactionable alerts as low-priority events. At low priority, on-call engineers do not receive intrusive, persistent high-priority mobile alerts for a minor issue. With priority alerting, engineers will always know the importance of the incident.

Zen Your Life With OnPage IT Alerting

Teams that understand the repercussions of alert fatigue are eager to address the issue of alert noise. With OnPage, on-call engineers have an effective way to overcome alert fatigue and take the progressive step toward a happy workforce.

Here is how OnPage empowers responders to speed up the triage process and resolve incidents quickly: 

Contextual alerts: Adding context to an alert ensures the incident is actionable. By creating actionable alerts with detailed information, IT teams can positively impact their mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Distinguishable alerts: Not all alerts are created equal or need the same level of attention. Some alerts are low priority and can be handled during normal business hours, while others are high priority and require an immediate incident response. Filter low-priority alerts so they do not wake up engineers overnight.

Keyword-based alerting: Trigger contextual, intelligent mobile alerts based on specific words found in tickets. If a string or word matches pre-set conditions, an OnPage alert is triggered and sent to the on-call responder. If conditions are not met, the on-call responder will not be disturbed.

Secure two-way messaging: OnPage’s alerting app enables engineers to securely message each other. Incident teams can enhance collaboration and break down silos without security concerns.

Digital scheduling: Use digital on-call schedules to create an equitable after-hours workload. Based on schedule configurations, OnPage will only alert the assigned or tasked on-call engineer. 

Reporting insights: Post-incident reports provide insight into the IT team’s incident response performance. Detailed reports allow teams to re-strategize for future IT-related incidents.

Conclusion

IT support teams face several obstacles during these unprecedented times. Whether alert fatigue or incident alert noise, teams must re-adjust to overcome these pandemic challenges and achieve workflow efficiency.

OnPage’s IT alerting system streamlines workflows and builds a stress-free incident management environment. The system equips teams with advanced capabilities to address and resolve incidents quickly. OnPage helps on-call engineers take control of the pandemic and provide unmatched IT servicing.