Persistence: the quality that allows someone to continue doing something or trying to do something even though it is difficult or opposed by other people; the state of occurring or existing beyond the usual, expected, or normal time.

Throughout history, there are examples of the persistent coming out victorious, despite the odds against them. The battle for St Lo, the Siege of Metz, the Siege of Yorktown. All testaments to good planning and persistence.

That same concept transfers to ensuring IT alerts are delivered and acknowledged. Any system can deliver an alert, but not every system can ensure it’s acknowledged. There needs to be good planning and a persistence to carrying out that plan.
Enterprise Alert does this. But how?

By offering:

• Integrated On-Call scheduling to assign Primary and multiple Backup personnel for alerts
• Ability to escalate an alert through a targeted team if no on-call schedule is referenced
• Ability to assign a stand-in for primary on-call personnel
• Multiple notification channels to reach out to on-call personnel, with personalized notification channel profiles
• Ability to keep cycling through a notification channel until someone responds
• Ability to re-run an entire escalation chain

Let’s start with the first point. Enterprise Alert allows you to manage your team’s on-call schedules in the software. These schedules are utilized to alert the appropriate personnel when an alert is raised. And aside from just a primary and backup person, we allow multiple personnel to be assigned as a backup via our auto-rotation scheduling. Utilizing auto-rotation, Enterprise Alert will automatically assign team members to primary and backup roles on the schedule. The order that people are placed on the schedule can be managed as well, giving full flexibility to team members and managers alike. So as the alert is raised to a team, Enterprise Alert can begin alerting the primary person and will have personnel to auto-escalate to if the primary, secondary, etc person don’t respond to/acknowledge the alert.

Next is the ability to escalate an alert through a targeted team. An alert can be assigned directly to a team as well, without utilizing the on-call schedule. In this scenario, the order in which personnel are notified can be set in the team settings. Enterprise Alert will simply notify the first person, utilizing their notification channel preference, until the pre-set notification timeout is reached. Then it’ll reach out to number two on the list. And then number three. And so on, until someone acknowledges the alert. For further depth in notification, an option is there to move everyone up the list after an alert goes out, so a team doesn’t always have a single person that gets notified first.

Enterprise Alert also offers the ability to assign “stand-ins” on the on-call schedule. Utilizing this feature, if someone has an appointment or is out sick, a stand-in can be assigned on the on-call schedule for a set amount of time up to 24 hours.

The next feature that adds to the persistence of Enterprise Alert is giving each user multiple notification channels that they can be reached on. Depending on company infrastructure, SMS, voice, email, smart app push, and skype for business chat are all supported. To add another layer of customization, each user that is going to be alerted can select the order of and which channels they want to be notified on. This can be further customized to set up time based profiles, allowing the user to choose certain channels for certain times of the day.

With all these notification channels available, Enterprise Alert also gives you the ability to keep cycling through them for a set amount of time. This time limit is set in an Alert Policy and allows the channels to be tried in sequence until the time limit is reached, allowing the user to be persistently reached until the alert is acknowledged.

Lastly, the option is there to keep repeating this entire chain until a user acknowledges the alert. This last option is what truly gives Enterprise Alert it’s persistence.

So, when you tie all of this together, you get a highly persistent alerting system that will ensure that your critical alerts are acknowledged and not just sent. Because any system can send alerts, but Enterprise Alert will ensure that someone actually gets it and acknowledges it through persistentence.

To see how this could work for you and your organization, request a 14-Day trial here.