Alert management

Alert Management or Alert Notification refer to the methods an organization uses to automate the process of targeting IT and other notifications internally and to external users. As opposed to alert messaging, which is concerned with simply delivering alerts to recipients, Alert Management focuses on sending specific alerts to particular users without mass messaging or spamming recipients with information they don’t need.
Within a business, Alert Management products are primarily used to direct event information from IT applications and systems to a specific person. Externally, Alert Management systems can be used to alert a group of people about an emergency or other important event.
Alert Management concentrates on gathering pertinent information about people within an organization, i.e. role, contact, schedule and task information, then using that data to intelligently target alerts. For instance, if a server goes down at Company A, an Alert Management platform would prevent that server from taking the typical default route of sending out a mass alert that could cause confusion within the IT organization. Instead, information about personnel stored in the Alert Management database would be used to find and contact the person best suited to resolve the problem, i.e. the person who is on-call, has stated that they are available, has requested to be notified of server outages, is on the server management team, and has the skills necessary to resolve the problem. If that person is unavailable, some Alert Management tools have the ability to escalate automatically until someone takes ownership of the event.
Alert Management as Defined by Gartner
The independent research firm Gartner has actively explored the effects of Alert Management within IT. In the February 2008 Gartner white paper Using Alert Notification Tools to Enhance IT Operations Management, Gartner analysts David Williams and Debra Curtis state that Alert Management automates the delivery of alerts to appropriate IT operations personnel using the most effective communications channel available. They go on to say that this functionally reduces the mean time to repair (MTTR) and enables IT professionals who are not looking at their display (including consoles, administration interfaces and information portals) to respond to critical IT events.
The key findings of the white paper are as follows:

• Alert notification products can lower the risk of critical issues being missed.
• Alert notification products increase IT operations efficiencies by enabling IT personnel to perform their other IT operations duties and still be notified of critical IT issues that require their immediate attention.
• Alert notification products can establish ownership and/or acknowledgment of an IT event, no matter where the alert recipient is located

David Williams wrote an additional white paper in May, 2008 called The Evolving Role of Alert Notification Tools in IT Operations where he introduced the importance of delivering alerts to a mobile workforce, then enabling them to take action from their mobile phones:

Alert notification tools are being asked to provide two distinct capabilities:
• Information Delivery Assurance — Ensuring the delivery of the right format to the right people at the right time.
• Remote Activity Enablement — Mobile, bidirectional communication with IT operations tools to verify and enable actions and task activation.
Information delivery assurance (IDA) can be considered "passive" because it is simply a data delivery mechanism with the ability to acknowledge receiving ownership of the information. Remote activity enablement (RAE) can be considered "active" because it enables full interaction with the IT operations management tools and the processes they support.

Information Request Management
The basis of effective Alert Management is Information Request Management: the process of determining what information goes to which people. In some Alert Management products, users or managers can utilize a self-service portal where they can enter specific information pertaining to their roles, responsibilities, attributes and contact information as well as scheduling and on-call information. In these products, rotation groups and schedules can be easily maintained in one web-based portal, not secluded in a static management system or on manual spreadsheets.
In addition, Information Request Management allows managers and staff to collect detailed contact information, so the system knows what device a user is most likely to respond to on any given day, when they’re unavailable, on vacation, only accessible by email, etc.
Actionable Information Delivery
Finding the right person to resolve an IT event is often a very manual process. Before the use of effective Information Request Management practices, manual processes were the only realistic alternative. Today, many companies without an Alert Management platform in place first learn about service problems from internal or customer calls to the help desk. From there, Service Management staff often use an excel spreadsheet to find the correct person to resolve the incident, and then use another spreadsheet for escalations. An automated Alert Management platform makes checking excel documents obsolete. Based on predetermined roles, responsibilities, attributes and contact information, the system will locate and contact the person best suited to address each incident, on the device they prefer, and then escalate automatically if necessary.
Automated escalation depends on Actionable Information Delivery, or the guarantee that the right information will actually reach the correct user. In a typical escalation process, that can mean alerting another person in the rotation group or a user higher up the chain of command. After going through all the communication options the original assignee has input into the self-service portal, the system automatically finds the next person who can resolve the issue.
Remote Action Enablement
Some Alert Management platforms provide mobile access from a smart phone to any IT monitoring, help or knowledge base application. This allows personnel to take an action within a mobile work flow using any web-enabled mobile phone, including Blackberry and iPhone. Mobile technicians can accept or escalate a ticket, browse system health and status, modify data and work within internal applications to resolve an incident. This capability far surpasses the traditional methods of alerting mobile personnel: paging and mass email.
Eliminating the need to move to a different location by employing a Smartphone, in combination with automated targeted notification, creates significant time savings. Change Management requests can be approved or rejected while in a meeting, incidents can be resolved before business-impact and systems can be checked at any time, from any location. Switching to a communication solution that is more effective than one-way pagers, emails or phone calls can also be beneficial to users who simply want to take ownership of an IT event so that no other users begin work on the problem.
Alert Management outside IT
Alert Management can also be used in an emergency or to alert large groups of people to a specific event. For example, during heavy and sudden snowstorms, the Denver International Airport uses an Alert Management platform to contact 500 people to plow the runways. Those 500 people can be contacted four different ways, i.e. phone, email, pager, IM. Prior to implementing Alert Management, it took 2-3 hours to contact those 500 people as administrators manually tried every different method until the user answered. After implementation, automated contact-escalation procedures allowed them to be contacted in 10 minutes.
This can be extended to emergencies like, for example, a fire in a school, where all parents have to be contacted immediately with specific information about the status of the event, where their children are, and where to access more information.

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