Continuing on with the series of blog posts that take a deeper look at how OpsGenie can be used to alleviate alert fatigue. One of the key capabilities of OpsGenie is to enable the users to control how they would like to be notified for different alerts at different times.
Most alert notification systems do not provide any controls to alert recipients over how they are notified. Typically, admins have to manage who gets notified for alerts. This is often an ongoing source of friction between the administrators of the alerting systems and folks on the receiving end of the alerts, creates significant overhead for admins. Users often complain about too many alert notifications or missing critical alerts lost in the noise.
Not all alerts are created equal nor they should be treated as such! Some alerts are critical and urgent and we want to receive notifications immediately using any and all notifications methods, and others can wait till the morning, or an email may be sufficient, etc. We find out it is as important for an alert notification system to NOT to wake you up unnecessarily as it is to ensure you wake up when it’s necessary. OpsGenie now puts the user in full control. Users can decide how to get notified for different alerts based on the alert data and the time of day. Notifications for acknowledged and closed alertsOpsGenie is designed to manage the life cycle for alerts. You can create an alert, acknowledge it, close it, etc., and we’ve added powerful email processing capabilities to enable OpsGenie users to automatically acknowledge and close alerts via emails as well as the API calls. However, some OpsGenie users prefer to receive a notification not only when an alert is created but also when it’s closed, etc. and have been creating separate alerts to be able to receive notifications. We’re happy to say that it’s no longer necessary to create alerts just to receive notifications. The new notification rules capabilities allow users to receive notifications when an alert is created, acknowledged and closed, and users can specify how they’d like to