A good notification system sends messages reliably and ensures that incidents are heard. However, a smart notification system also ensures that it never bothers its users. In case of major incidents or outages, this is very important because typically a lot of monitors trigger events at the same time. In such cases, users are flooded with messages when there is no in-built intelligence in the notification system that protects users from alarm floods. The objective at the end is always to enable people to react smartly and to improve the overall situation. This of course all depends on people being able to know that there are problems in the first place, which is achieved by sending messages quickly and reliably. However, if this happens too often within a very short time frame, users feel spammed and cannot really do their job. At this point, new messages are no longer of any value and become counterproductive.

That’s exactly the reason why we at Derdack thought it would be awesome to introduce a Flood Protection algorithm into the world’s most innovative notification software: Enterprise Alert® 2015.

In this blog article I’d like to explain what’s possible here and how it works.

How it works

It is important to understand that flood protection in Enterprise Alert® focuses on the user and not the incident. With this feature, we primarily have people in mind and how we can protect them from unwanted messages. This means that Enterprise Alert® continuously measures the number of messages it sends to an individual within a given amount of time. It does not try to correlate incoming incidents or suppress them when first received by Enterprise Alert®.

If the number of messages Enterprise Alert® sends increases too much, it simply tells the user that a flood situation has been detected and no further messages follow until the flood situation is over.

Once Enterprise Alert® has detected that the flood is over and no more alerts have been created for the user within a given amount of time, it “unlocks” the user and notifies them in a flood period summary message which messages have not been sent.

Thus, flood protection is an option that each user can activate or deactivate individually in their profile settings.

 

Configuration options

In the UI, each user is only able to activate or deactivate flood protection. The Flood Protection algorithm itself is not configurable, at least not in the UIJ. However, under the hood, the algorithm can still be fine-tuned. Here, it is possible to adjust the text that is sent to users in case a flood is detected as well as when the flood is over. The following table explains the options more in detail. All parameters can be found in the xml files profman.xml and Strings.xml, which are located in the following directory:
%Program Files%Enterprise Alert

Before you edit the files, please stop the Enterprise Alert® Server Windows service. After you have saved your changes, please start the service again.