Hi
Dirk,
I was thinking that
some future evolution of SA could be to take it from just a monitoring/alerting
system to a system that allows you to MANAGE alerts and
issues.
Here is the
situation I was faced with yesterday:
I had a problem that
required us to reboot a system to resolve. This system has several
dependant checks on it for various services.
While I COULD have
put the top-level check in maintenance mode to prevent alerts from being sent, I
didn't because I needed to let support people know that there was an outage at
that time in case anyone contacted them directly.
My initial thought
last night was to suggest the following to the SA list:
A new context menu
on a check: [SEND MANUAL ALERT]. This menu option would present
a list of all the alerts configured for the check and allow operator to MANUALLY
enter a message and force a send.
SO, I could have
gone to this main-level check, picked [SEND MANUAL ALERT], selected my "Send
Email" alerts, and entered something like: "System being rebooted to
resolve issue X. Should be back online in 10 minutes."
SA would then send
that custom message to everyone who normally received the alert.
The result is that
SA becomes a tool through which I can start to manage communication as well as
status. Proactive notification via the same delivery process that SA
currently uses.
That got me thinking
some more about what I could do with SA and I came up with the following long
term (Version 7?) idea:
Make
SA become
more of a management tool rather than just an alert
mechanism.
Most likely via a
new GUI (and separately licensed tool) - but now I could call up logs of items
that went into alert. Track issue/cause, resolution and dispatch someone
to resolve. That data could then become more available to link back to
current alerts. Something like: This issue has happened 5 times
before, here are previous causes, resolution steps, etc.
All that could lead
to a change in the SA GUI to focus more on the response and management of
issues.
In short, move SA
from a back-of-house monitor into more of a front-of-house issue/event
management tool.
Any
thoughts?
Tom
V.
PS: even if you
don't like the long term view - any comments on the "SEND MANUAL ALERT" feature
idea?
** All comments are
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