Building an Effective Alert Strategy

Alerts are an essential part of performance monitoring. Alerts and notifications need to be sent out as soon as an issue is identified, allowing you to know about any problems before your customers do. In this week’s Tip Tuesday, we look at building an effective alert strategy and how to utilize Catchpoint Alerts so that you can quickly and effectively leverage the information provided to take carefully targeted action and improve your MTTR.

Building an effective alert strategy is important.

The first component to this is building an approach to testing, which is geared towards fulfilling the main goals of your monitoring process. When there are too many alerts, alert fatigue can quickly set in. Take the time to decide which metrics are critical and then determine the right test strategy for these metrics. Once you’ve decided on the correct test type, identify the locations to monitor from and determine the optimal test frequency. With Catchpoint, you can create alerts tied to your entire service delivery chain, including third-party vendors such as DNS, APIs, CDNs, and cloud providers.

The next step is setting up a well-defined response strategy. When a notification is sent out, who should receive it? By assigning specific alerts to specific response teams, you can reduce noise and ensure the right people are receiving the right information to quickly troubleshoot and resolve the specific problem. Not all team members need to be looped into every incident notification.

The Catchpoint platform allows you to set up alerts that trigger during a test run when a specific user-defined criterion is met. These alerts can be grouped into “incidents”. Incidents associate an alert, or multiple alerts with a common external cause. And these incidents can be used as a marker indicating the issue was investigated making it easier to track alert status.

You should also think about determining the correct level of urgency for each incoming notification. Not every alert needs immediate attention. However, if, for instance, any of your IP prefixes are unreachable for end users, you will want to know about it as soon as possible. Assigning alerts by priority level allows you to reduce the amount of time spent resolving issues that don’t have a significant impact on end-user experience or the overall business. When each alert notification is linked to a priority level, your team will be able to more efficiently separate the signals from the noise.

Leveraging Alerts

In this week’s short video, we look at what happens after you’ve created your Alerts so you can quickly leverage that information to investigate the problem and apply a solution.

This video shows how Catchpoint can help you:

• Review and manage issues found by tests in your system using Alerts and Incidents
• Filter the alert log to quickly narrow in on exactly the alerts that are affecting you
• Configure how and when you receive notifications and determine who is receiving them
• Gain further control over how and when alerts are triggered through the Advanced Alerts settings
• Integrate Catchpoint’s Alerts with your main troubleshooting system