When the phone rings, who will pick it up?

Being able to escalate alert notifications to someone that will actually “answer the phone” is critical in today’s fast paced, IT environment. You need to ensure that you have the proper notification systems in place to provide for this escalation of IT alerting. It’s critical to your company’s mean time to resolution as well as your department’s image. If you’re not providing quick responses to issues, you’re failing your organization.

Take this scenario…

Bob set the schedule. He let John and Amber know they’d be covering after hours support for database issues. The NOC had the schedule of who was on call, an Excel sheet printout. They had John and Amber’s email and phone numbers. They had a protocol to follow to let them know if something was wrong.

NOC personnel sat diligently watching the screen for any issues that might arise. Another update rolls by, another log file, another normal night in the NOC. And then it happens. Coming back from getting a coffee, they notice a critical alert in their database. How long has that been there? Fifteen minutes? Since the NOC personnel on duty don’t have DBA experience, they breakout the contact list. They see that John’s the first contact and try to give him a call.

No answer, so a voicemail is left and the wait begins again. They try calling again. Again no answer. Time to try the next one. So Amber gets a call. A voicemail is left before trying again later. Another phone call and another voicemail. In the meantime, the database is at a standstill and can’t process anything else. How many customers have they missed in the time zones that are awake? Web traffic is high this time at night as most of Europe is at work, so missed orders are what the company is getting as potential customers get error pages…and look elsewhere for their products.

So, just because it’s ringing doesn’t mean someone will be there to pick it up, and when NOC personnel get too busy with customer calls, who ensures that they will be able to keep reaching out to on call personnel?

This is why you need a good notification software.

This is why you need Enterprise Alert. With Enterprise Alert, you get a software suite that allows for real time alerting on multiple notification channels for on-call personnel. You also get:

1. Multiple channel notification capability. Alerts can go out on Push, Voice, Text, Email, etc.
2. Personalized notification profiles. Users can decide which channels they want to be notified on, as well as in which order. Rather the first notice come via Voice? No problem. Set it in the profile.
3. Channel escalation. Decide how long to wait for an answer before going to the next channel and person that’s on-call.
4. Real time tracking of alerts. See who’s being notified as well as when they acknowledge the alert, with annotations from the user being alerted.
5. Built in on-call scheduling. Schedule personnel in primary and backup roles as well as allowing for stand-ins when someone has an emergency or appointment.
6. Hierarchal alerting. Bring the manager into the fold if an alert goes un-answered for too long, providing even more oversight to the process.

So now let’s see how that same scenario plays out when Enterprise Alert is added to the equation and the Excel printout of the schedule is removed.

That same error is raised in the system, but instead of waiting to have NOC personnel see it and react to it, Enterprise Alert automatically grabs the alert and raises it to John via a Push notification. The alert notification is instantaneous from Enterprise Alert. After John doesn’t respond for the pre-set time in the Alert Policy to the push notification, the alert is escalated to the next notification channel instantaneously and a phone call is made. Again no response. So now Amber is sent a Push notification. As she receives it while hanging out with her friends at dinner, she’s able to see what the full alert is on her iPhone. A simple fix, she simply selects the remote action from her phone presented to her by Enterprise Alert and the database is up and running again in a matter of minutes.

The response times are dramatically different, and the only thing that changed was the addition of Enterprise Alert to the equation. Enterprise Alert provided immediate and fully automated raising of the alert to the proper on-call personnel, escalating it further, over multiple channels, as the calls went unanswered.

This type of escalation allows for flexibility and reliability when receiving new IT alerts. And with a powerful mobile app to go with it, it allows for the mobility your on call personnel desire.

To more fully explore Enterprise Alert’s ability to escalate IT alerts, please visit us here and request a free 14-day trial of the software.