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OnPage is a secure messaging solution that eliminates the need to carry a Traditional Pager. Separate the critical messages from the clutter while maintaining HIPAA compliance . OnPage has a stellar history of ensuring Critical, Time-sensitive messages always get to the right person right away!
Our cloud based solution supports the need for a high-availability, scalable messaging system. We elevate the level of awareness to critical alerts on all leading mobile devices.
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In this blog we highlight approaches to managed security as a service. We also look into ConnectWise’s value in aiding MSPs’ security management and indicate why critical alerting is a necessary integration.
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We take a look at some of the most common obstacles that IT teams run into as they work relentlessly to keep all the alarms and sirens from going off at once.
If you are IT support and need to work after hours to resolve customer issues then here are a few tips on how to handle after hours support
Postmortem reporting allow us to examine mistakes in a way that focuses on the situational aspects of a failure’s mechanism and the decision-making process of individuals proximate to the failure. Read our guide on how to handle IT post-mortem reporting.
IN THIS BLOG WE DISCUSS HOW YOU CAN INCREASE YOUR PRODUCTIVITY BY: • Consolidating MSP communications • Automating workflow and streamlining business processes • Scheduling recurring tickets • Using incident alert management tools
The goal of this blog is to: > note what has impeded us from reaching effective life on-call > provide 3 steps to mastering life on-call > highlight what will be achieved with effective life on-call
We asked our MSP customer base what their favorite tools were and how they help them serve clients. We focused our questions on favorite tools in the following categories: >PSA tools >RMM tools >Alert management tools >Communication tools and Mobile Device Management tools.
By reading this blog, MSPs will gain insight into how to improve communications with their clients as well as establish a more profitable business.
The goal of this blog is: - To define the incident management process - To go over the key elements of an incident management system - To look into incident alert management tools that integrate with ConnectWise.
Equip yourself with The ConnectWise Incident Response Guide
Read our guide on how to survive being on-call.
After-hours service is a fact of life for most MSPs. While not the most pleasant aspect of the job, there are ways to make after-hours servicing a more profitable and organized enterprise.
5 Ways to automate alert management in ConnectWise // The art of alerting is in automation. When humans are removed from the alerting process, errors are fewer and action is almost immediate. But how do you automate the alerting process and what are the factors you need to consider when doing so?
ConnectWise and their customers need to ensure critical alerts automatically reach the right person at the right time. MSP superheros efficiently respond to these alerts key is providing automatic, intelligent alerting that generates a complete audit trial, while at the same doing it all seamlessly.
ConnectWise and their customers need to ensure all critical alerts not only reach the right person at the right time, but are also acted upon in a timely manner. The key is providing automatic, intelligent alerting that generates a complete audit trial, while at the same time doing it all seamlessly
OnPage: Incident management and secure messaging on your smartphone
Why pager replacement is still an issue
OnPage has what some might call a “hate/hate” relationship with pagers. Not much room for love. As we see it, pagers are an antiquated bit of technology. Pagers are dinosaurs which, like most dinosaurs, should be extinct by now.
You might be wondering why we’re at it again with our anti-dinosaur campaign? Haven’t we made our point in previous articles and thought pieces? Well, to be frank, the answer is NO. You see, last week we came across a great article in Computer World discussing the “dead zone” issue. A dead zone is an area where you cannot receive pages due to outside interference from technology or the environment you’re in.
Reading this article, we just couldn’t contain ourselves. See, the article reiterated all that we’ve rallied against in using pagers; why they are unreliable, why they can’t be trusted in an emergency, why they are obsolete. That kind of talk made us realize that the fight is still ongoing and that we need to bring the issue up once again.
What part of dead zone did you not understand?
This great Computer World article retold the told the tale of how a new hire is handed a pager on his first day of work at an IT company and told he will be on-call. The notion that pagers have problems and dead zones doesn’t seem to penetrate the consciousness of his manager:
…
On Beyond Tools
A conversation I recently had with the DevOps manager of a major online retailer really made me think about DevOps monitoring tools. The manager and I discussed how several DevOps shops seem to define themselves based on the number of tools they have monitoring their build and IT stack. The point he went on to make is:
You can go up and down the isles at a conference with the corporate credit card and buy every tool in sight but all those purchases don’t make you a DevOps. All it makes you is the owner of many tools.
The point of the manager’s comment is that being an effective DevOps shop or IT service provider means you go beyond just owning tools. You have to incorporate those tools into a meaningful DevOps philosophy and an understanding of proper tool management and proper team integration. And, importantly from my humble perspective, proper alerting.
DevOps, as a philosophy, encourages shifting left and putting testing earlier into the process so that teams can be proactive in their support rather than reactive to problems. So, how does a DevOps enable this shift in thinking from reactive to proactive? Read on to find out.
Devops monitoring tools – a love affair
Devops is about bringing development and operational teams together. And to some extent, tools can be a way to improve this relationship. A recent whitepaper from Puppet describes how:
…
Not all alerts are created equal
Even though most IT teams have adopted IT alerting practices, they are often far from alerting best practices. It’s not enough to just have an alerting tool. Like a monitoring tool, if left uncalibrated, alerts will simply produce a sea of noisy data. Instead, teams should calibrate alerts so that they are meaningful.
For example, a meaningful alert might be something along the line of web requests are taking more than x seconds to process and respond or new servers are failing to spin up as expected. And these are great examples of what could be high priority alerts for a company.
Alternatively, alerts that are less high priority, such as server is 90% full can be a low priority alert that can be forwarded to the on call engineer but don’t rise to the level of a 2am wakeup call. In OnPage, you can send this low priority alert to go to the engineer’s account but ensure the account notifies the engineer during normal business hours.
6 steps to IT alerting best practices
It’s an important realization that not all alerting needs to wake up an engineer. The trick to successful alerting is to provide meaningful alerts when issues do occur. To this end, OnPage has the following alerting best practices which have been vetted by our numerous end users:
- Make sure your alerts are calibrated. Establish a baseline so you know how your systems are supposed to work
- Ensure alerts are tied to a schedule.
OnPage has a zero tolerance policy when it comes to undelivered messages and alerts, which is why we added Failover Redundancy to our critical alerting platform. Failover Redundancy is, simply put, a part of our Escalation Policy.
Or at least that’s the word according to a new blog from Tech Target on AWS’s new Managed Services (MS) offering. According to the blog, AWS is launching their AWS MS program to expedite the adoption of cloud by Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 companies. The article published last week notes AWS’ belief that companies want:
[T]o add additional automation, make use of standard components that can be used more than once, and to relieve their staff of as many routine operational duties as possible.
Further explanation is provided in AWS’ announcement of their new product which they claim is designed to take over system monitoring, incident management, change control provisioning and patch management. Indeed, these are usually functions that fall under the auspices of IT Ops. And as the Tech Target article goes on to note:
After all of this, the only ones left standing could be application developers, despite — or thanks to — Amazon’s vast array of development tools.
So, if we follow AWS’s logic, we might think that they have sunk their claws into the whole IT management life-cycle. The question then becomes, has AWS set the stakes for IT management to meet its maker? Ummmm, not so fast, Cowboy.
The first thing to note in reading the Tech Target blog…
[T]o add additional automation, make use of standard components that can be used more than once, and to relieve their staff of as many routine operational duties as possible.
Further explanation is provided in AWS’ announcement of their new product which they claim is designed to take over system monitoring, incident management, change control provisioning and patch management. Indeed, these are usually functions that fall under the auspices of IT Ops. And as the Tech Target article goes on to note:
After all of this, the only ones left standing could be application developers, despite — or thanks to — Amazon’s vast array of development tools.
So, if we follow AWS’s logic, we might think that they have sunk their claws into the whole IT management life-cycle. The question then becomes, has AWS set the stakes for IT management to meet its maker? Ummmm, not so fast, Cowboy.
One cloud to rule them all
The first thing to note in reading the Tech Target blog…
In a world where we get alerts and notifications for anything under the sun it is important to differentiate which alerts are important and which alerts can be dealt with later. For this very reason, the OnPage platform enables the user to send messages in two different formats: High Priority and Low Priority. Our unique ringtones and persistent alerts provide the users with the ability to send various message priorities and ensure that messages rise above the clutter.
High Priority Messaging comes with an intrusive, hard to ignore Alert-until-Read tone. OnPage alerts mimic the pager urgency but also enables a rich, full text message with voice or picture attachments. Designed for critical, time-sensitive situations, the OnPage alert assures the sender that the message has reached its destination and was read. A good use of the High Priority feature is to use it for time sensitive messaging, urgent messaging, medical emergencies, and critical alerts coming in from monitoring tools.
Fig 2: You can go to settings to change the tone of the High and Low Priority alerts.
Low Priority
Low Priority Messaging can be regarded as continuous messaging, with replies that go back and forth. Unlike other casual messaging apps, however, users can track the messages that are being…
Fig 1: You can select the priority of the message from within the app.
High Priority
High Priority Messaging comes with an intrusive, hard to ignore Alert-until-Read tone. OnPage alerts mimic the pager urgency but also enables a rich, full text message with voice or picture attachments. Designed for critical, time-sensitive situations, the OnPage alert assures the sender that the message has reached its destination and was read. A good use of the High Priority feature is to use it for time sensitive messaging, urgent messaging, medical emergencies, and critical alerts coming in from monitoring tools.
Fig 2: You can go to settings to change the tone of the High and Low Priority alerts.
Low Priority
Low Priority Messaging can be regarded as continuous messaging, with replies that go back and forth. Unlike other casual messaging apps, however, users can track the messages that are being…
This past year has been one of great growth and performance for OnPage. We have added many features and integrations to the product, making 2016 an awesome year. We see these steps forward as the basis for future growth.
Boston Business Journal writes: OnPage brings critical alerting to smartphone.
OnPage
1
Solutions
52
Articles & Videos
6
Contributors
OnPage is a secure messaging solution that eliminates the need to carry a Traditional Pager. Separate the critical messages from the clutter while maintaining HIPAA compliance . OnPage has a stellar history of ensuring Critical, Time-sensitive messages always get to the right person right away!
Our cloud based solution supports the need for a high-availability, scalable messaging system. We elevate the level of awareness to critical alerts on all leading mobile devices.
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