What are Alerts?
In IT and infrastructure management, alerts are events—occurrences or changes in the operation of a system network, process, or workflow—that require attention. Alerts are a notification mechanism to signal a potential problem that could cause performance, availability, security, or other issues.
Alert Challenges
Given the complexity of hybrid/multi-cloud infrastructures—with individual tools and systems each issuing its own alerts—you can end up with a lot of alert noise, which creates management challenges and potentially leads to alert fatigue. There are several factors that contribute to this problem:
• Huge volumes of undifferentiated alerts make prioritization difficult. The more alerts you are fielding, the more difficult it is to triage them to identify the most critical ones based on severity and impact.
• Duplicate alerts create extra work. Because of the complex interdependencies in IT infrastructures, multiple alerts from different systems could, in fact, all be part of a single problem.
• Lack of sufficient detail can slow remediation. Knowing there is a problem is only the first step to addressing it, but the alert may not include the information needed to determine how to resolve it.
Smarter Hybrid Infrastructure Alerting with Virtana
Virtana Platform’s policy engine and event correlation improve your ability to manage alerts so you can find and fix problems faster. You can leverage policy as a code to easily create policies to reduce noise and use out-of-the-box policies to suppress duplicate events. You can also enrich events with business-related information and even auto-create ServiceNow incidents for faster response. Contact us to learn more or to book a demo.
Suggested Reading and Related Topics
• Events vs. Alerts vs. Incidents: Understand the differences between events, alerts, and incidents.
• Root Cause Analysis: Learn how the root cause analysis problem-solving approach enables you to identify the source of an issue so it can be resolved to prevent recurrence.
• Observability: Discover how infrastructure observability can improve monitoring and alert management of your IT environment.
• IPM Guide—Infrastructure Performance Monitoring: Learn more about IPM and how it can benefit your organization.