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    • Enterprise Alert® 2015: Flood Protection is so cool!

    Enterprise Alert® 2015: Flood Protection is so cool!

    • December 11, 2014
    • Technical

    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.

    Xml Property name
    File
    Description
    FloodProtectionTimeSpan
    profman.xml
    Specifies the time span in seconds in which the messages that are sent to a user are counted. The default value is a minute (60).
    FloodProtectionMaxMessagesInTimeSpan
    profman.xml
    Specifies the maximum number of messages that are sent to each user in the time span set above. The default value is 5. This means that Enterprise Alert® will never send more than 5 notifications per minute to each user. However, keep in mind that corresponding alerts are always created in Enterprise Alert® regardless of whether flood protection is enabled or not. Flood protection only means that the number of alert notifications is throttled per user.
    FloodProtectionDetectionMessageMediaType
    profman.xml
    Specifies the notification channel through which to send notifications about detected floods. If the number of messages exceeds the number set above, Enterprise Alert® sends a “final” notification advising the user that they are now flood protected via the channel specified here. A voice-call possibly makes a lot of sense here. The flood alert must be acknowledged to acknowledge all alerts with flood protected (not sent) notifications.
    FloodProtectionSummaryMessageMediaType
    profman.xml
    Once a user is flood protected, they will only receive new alert notifications when less messages than the maximum number of allowed messages are going to be generated than in the configured interval above. Enterprise Alert® then sends a notification to the user notifying them that the flood is now over. This property enables you to configure the notification channel for this “flood over” notification. Since this message also contains a summary of alerts for which the user hasn’t received any notifications while being flood protected, it makes sense to set this value to “E-mail”. This alert listing can also be excluded from the message, which might make sense for example for voice calls (configured by setting the value to “Voice-Call” instead).
    UserFloodDetectedSubject
    Strings.xml
    Specifies the subject of notifications for detected floods
    UserFloodDetectedText
    Strings.xml
    Specifies the message body of notifications for detected floods
    UserFloodDetectedTextHtml
    Strings.xml
    Specifies the message body in HTML format of notifications for detected floods
    UserFloodSummarySubject
    Strings.xml
    Specifies the subject of notifications sent once the flood is over
    UserFloodSummaryText
    Strings.xml
    Specifies the message body of notifications sent once the flood is over
    UserFloodSummaryTextHtml
    Strings.xml
    Specifies the message body in HTML format of notifications sent once the flood is over
    UserFloodSummaryAlertDetails
    Strings.xml
    Formats the listing of alerts in the “flood over” notification specifying the notifications the user did not receive while being flood protected
    UserFloodSummaryAlertDetailsHtml
    Strings.xml
    Formats the listing of alerts in HTML format in the “flood over” notification specifying the notifications the user did not receive while being flood protected

    Summary

    As you can see, flood protection is a powerful mechanism that ensures that message recipients are never flooded with notifications. While the feature can only be activated and deactivated individually by each user in the UI, the flood protection algorithm can be adjusted in xml files. If you would like to activate this feature for all your Enterprise Alert® users, you can to run the following SQL against your Enterprise Alert® database: UPDATE MMPROFILES SET NEWINFO = 1

    You may also want to watch a video on Flood Protection in which you can see how the experience looks like: http://vimeo.com/114234552 and https://vimeo.com/148879728

    Tagged

    Anti-Floodconfigurationflood protectionmessage storm

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    • Use Cases
      • Overview
      • Enterprise IT Alerting
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      • Critical Operations Alerting in Banking & Financial
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      • Use Cases in other Industries
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      • Enterprise Alert®
        • Overview
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