Send relevant Status Updates for Alerts to Team Managers and Members

Enterprise Alert can send status updates for alerts to managers and team members. For example the manager can get a notification while she is in a meeting that the issue has been solved. Or, a team member that has missed an alert gets a notification that is team mate took over.

Although Enterprise Alert provides default notification texts for these purposes, you can easily adapt the format of those notifications to fit your own needs, e.g. to follow corporate policies or user requirements. The format and content of these default notifications are stored in a file called “strings.xml” which you can find in the root directory of your Enterprise Alert installation. This XML file contains the following sections that relate to default notification messages:

<param name=”NotifyTextTicketOpened”>…</param>
<param name=”NotifyTextTicketAccepted”>…</param>
<param name=”NotifyTextTicketNotAccepted”>…</param>
<param name=”NotifyTextTicketClosed”>…</param>
<param name=”NotifyTextTicketClosedInEventSource”>…</param>
<param name=”NotifyTextTicketUnanswered”>…</param>
<param name=”NotifyTextTicketFailed”>…</param>
<param name=”NotifyTextTicketCanceled”>…</param>
<param name=”NotifyTextTicketError”>…</param>

Please note that there are different sections for different for different languages, e.g. English and German. Each section looks like the following:

<param name=”(Name)”> <value>(Message)</value> </param>

(Name) describes the trigger for the particular notification message and (Message) defines the content. You can change the content of (Message) to meet your specific requirements. Please, make sure you ONLY change the content between <value> and </value>. Anything else will render the overall XML file wrong-formatted and leave Enterprise Alert in a faulty state.

Placeholders and dynamic content

When you look at the (Message) value, you will find that placeholders are used, e.g. %TICKET. You can use these placeholders to insert dynamic content at runtime. The following placeholders are available:

%TICKET = Alert Short ID
%TYPE = User, Team or Schedule
%DESTINATION = Destination Name (e.g. Team12)
%RESPONSE_SENDER = The user who changed the status of the alert
%MSG = Description provided by the user altering the alert status, e.g. via SMS reply
%ALERT = Policy who originally started the alert notification workflow/alarm

The default notification message to a team manager looks like:

<param name=”NotifyTextTicketOpened”>
<value>An alert with ID %TICKET was opened for the alert %ALERT to %DESTINATION.
</value>
</param>

A submitted notification message will thus at runtime look like:

“An alert with ID 123 was opened for the alert MyPolicy to MyFirstTeam”.

Example
A good change would be for instance the following:

<param name=”NotifyTextTicketOpened”>
<value>A new alarm to %DESTINATION with ID %TICKET was triggered through the following policy: %ALERT
</value>
</param>

Be VERY careful when changes any contents of “strings.xml” and make a backup before altering this particular XML file. XML files are particularly sensitive and you might leave Enterprise Alert in a non-working state if you make an error in XML formatting and leave an inconsistent file.

Actually, you can tweak a lot more texts, messages and contents used in Enterprise Alert through this file but more on this in later blog articles.

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