Alerts and Notifications
Long before an end-user calls to say, “The network is down,” you want to know about problems. With InterMapper, it’s easy to do this.
InterMapper network monitoring software has extremely flexible alert and notification options so that you always stay abreast of the current state of problems. These capabilities include:
- A wide-variety of alerting methods — sounds, email messages, pages, text messages to cell phones via SMS, SNMP traps sent to selected receivers, popup messages, and syslogs, and more.
- Notification schedules (e.g. time of day, weekend only, etc.)
- Assign alerts to various individuals or groups.
- Time delays minimize “nuisance” alarms.
- Powerful escalation options help track unresolved issues.
- Automatic dependencies suppress alerts for devices "behind" a failed router or switch.
- Build your own alerts with by creating scripts that provoke action in response to failure.
Every time InterMapper tests a device, it collects operational statistics. This information includes response time, packet loss, and other values specific to that probe. If any of those values exceed a threshold, the device’s severity changes from OK to warning, alarm, critical or down status.
Alerts can be triggered whenever a device changes status, and each status can have its own set of notifications. These notifications can be assigned person-by-person to accommodate individual responsibilities or schedule shifts, or to groups of individuals who all need to be notified of problems.
There are a number of options on notifications: you can set a delay to avoid notifying for short outages or problems. You can also set a repeat interval and count to be sure that the alert gets delivered.
Escalation of problems is easy. If a device goes down, you can immediately alert the tech on call. You can also set a delay, and if the device remains down for that time period, you can send an alert to other people; another longer delay could even be used as belt-and-suspenders alerts to other administrators.
Acknowledgements
InterMapper also supports the ability to acknowledge a condition. This allows a technician to indicate that the problem is being worked on. Acknowledging a device will:
- Silence any further alerts that would otherwise be sent for the device
- Allow you to enter a comment that is logged and appears in the Status window
- Turn its icon blue, to indicate that it’s being worked on
The last point means that when things are “normal”, all icons are green (working fine) or blue (having trouble, but being worked on.) Any yellow, orange or red icons indicate new problems.
Automatic Dependencies
InterMapper uses the “vantage point” to determine that an existing outage has made equipment behind it unreachable. This suppresses notifications for those devices to avoid unwanted alerts, and graphically dims the devices on the map to show they’re being “shadowed”.
Create Your Own Notifiers for Custom Actions
Alerts can be sent through all the standard mechanisms. However, it’s straightforward to create your own scripts that perform specific tasks as actions.
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