IBM Releases Beta of New Cloud Based Alert Notification Service

IBM has released a new Alert Notification Service on IBM Cloud which allows DevOps teams to receive and respond to early, critical alerts about potential issues concerning their applications, before users are affected.

Now available in beta on IBM’s Bluemix Cloud Platform, the IBM Alert Notification Service works with the real-time and historical network analytics of IBM Netcool Operations Insight. By forming a single, coherent view across networks and operations, this new tool allows developers and operators to receive notification when attention is required. 

The notification can be received in email, SMS or voice. The developers can use the REST API to integrate with the service to notify the right team. To help protect against downtime, the service can be configured for escalations to significantly diminish the time needed to identify and respond to an alert.

To ensure teams never miss any alerts, IBM Alert Notification Service is built to allow teams to create customized notification policies, ensuring alerts are routed immediately to the right team members. The tool also allows users to opt to receive alerts via text or voicemail, in addition to e-mail. The service also works with on premise solutions for clients who want to deploy it across hybrid environments.

Custom IT environment monitoring: IBM Alert Notification offers easy-to-implement filtering of alerts, for example on the severity of problems, so that you can focus on the real problems and disregard the “noise” in your IT environment. You can create custom groups of contacts to reflect the structure of your organization, so that the right notifications reach the right staff, streamlining and simplifying the process of determining who to contact when specific problems occur and how to contact them.

Notification channels: Define the IT subject matter experts who can respond to problems in your environment and store their contact details in IBM Alert Notification so that they can be automatically notified of problems that affect them. Users can be organized into groups and you can send notifications to several users at once. Notifications can be sent by email, SMS, and voice.

Policy-based notifications: Define which alerts you want IBM Alert Notification to notify you about. Create filters based on the alerts that occur in your IT environment, customize the filters to account for alert frequencies and “x-in-y” type scenarios, and assign users and groups who are notified when matching problems occur. Unacknowledged alerts can be escalated after a set time period to the appropriate contact. Filters can be created for your IT monitoring requirements, such as the severity and status of alerts.

Alert Viewer: Monitor the status of alerts and notifications online, perform actions on alerts and track them in real time. Alert severities enable you to prioritize easily. The notification state allows you to track alerts from their receipt by the system through acknowledgment to resolution. You can track changes in the Alert History. You can use predefined and real-time filters to change which alerts you want to see.

The IBM Alert Notification Service is available in the Bluemix catalog at the link below.