Mobile alerting with tracking & escalation for NetCrunch
Why Enterprise Alert
NetCrunch is a monitoring solution that can send out alerts to incidents that are created, but all too often the emails that are sent from critical events are missed. Enterprise Alert ensures that all on duty members receive, acknowledge and resolve those critical alerts, all from their smartphones. With persistent notifications and escalation chains there will never be a critical alert that goes unattended. Enterprise Alert also offers ad-hoc collaboration between team members for each and every alert, so Subject Matter Experts can be looped in to help resolve issues.
How it Works
Enterprise Alert email address establishes connection with NetCrunch to enable mobile notification and alerting capabilities for operational and network teams.
Integration Capabilities
- Forwards NetCrunch incident information to Enterprise Alert for mobile alerting
- Uses SMTP email to connect to your Enterprise Alert team
- Staff can acknowledge and take ownership for critical events that occur
- Communicate within an alert to address a problem
- Alerts are escalated in case of no response
- On-call scheduling to alert the right people at the right time
Scenarios
- Server Monitoring
- Resource Monitoring
- Network Analytics
- Helpdesk Ticketing
How to Integrate
In our example we are sending incident information from NetCrunch to a team within Enterprise Alert by directing communication to a user with the email address configured in the Notification Channel section.
Integration Steps
- First, we need to make sure that the Enterprise Alert email address is assigned to a user. In our example, we have added the Enterprise Alert email address to the Admin user. Alert policy rules within NetCrunch can automatically route incidents to a specific user and since the Enterprise Alert team email address is entered here, the entire team will receive the alerts.
- In our account we ensured that the admin would receive all alerts by going to Monitoring > Alert Escalation Scripts. In the Default preconfigured setting we see the Admin will get all alerts sent via email.
What would normally be sent as an email will now be received by Enterprise Alert. The system will parse the email for matching conditions and if matched, will raise alerts via push, sms and voice calls to an entire team or to a specific on-call duty member.
Here is an example of an incoming email alert for a node that is down:
- We now need to create an alert policy to trigger from an incoming email. The following screenshots is an example of how this can be configured. Keep in mind your emails and business needs may differ.
- We triggered this email again and based on the conditions set “Subject contains Node Down” the policy was triggered, and notifications were sent out.
Notifications within the Enterprise Alert mobile app
Enterprise Alert comes complete with a mobile app allowing for all critical alert details to be seen from anywhere. Users can acknowledge and take ownership of alerts and with remote actions, even resolve them. Team members collaborate with their peers so that even if an on-call person is not the SME, that person is easily within reach via voice call, text or email.
A centralized Alert Center can be viewed from the web portal. All alerts, whether active, overdue or closed are visible to EA admins. Ownership and even delegation is as easy as drag-and-dropping the alert to the person/team.
