Alerting

Takeaway

Mutiny offers flexible alerting capabilities, integrating with both email, SMS, and API-based systems like ServiceNow to streamline notifications and helpdesk ticketing processes.

Alerting Options

Effective alerting is a cornerstone of Mutiny’s monitoring system, ensuring that the right messages are delivered to the right people at the right time. Our alerting engine is highly flexible, allowing teams to set up alerts for specific conditions, escalation paths, and even integration with external systems for automated workflows.

Mutiny supports multiple alert delivery options, such as:

• Email

• SMS/Text

• Pop-up

• Helpdesk Integration

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• ServiceNow & Other API-based Reporting Systems: Mutiny can push alerts to ServiceNow or other integrated platforms via REST APIs, enabling automatic creation of incidents or tickets in your helpdesk system.

Our shift pattern helps manage alerts effectively across the day, ensuring that alerts are routed based on the time of day and the personnel on shift. For example:

• Daytime alerts can be sent via email.

• Evening alerts (from 6pm to 9pm) can be sent via SMS to key personnel.

• Late-night alerts (after 9pm) can be routed to a 3rd party helpdesk or the on-call staff.

API-based Alerting Integration

Mutiny’s alerting engine supports integration with external systems through REST APIs. This enables seamless communication with ServiceNow, Zendesk, or any other ticketing system that supports API access. Alerts generated by Mutiny can automatically trigger the creation of tickets or incidents, ensuring timely attention to issues.

• ServiceNow Integration: Alerts from Mutiny can be configured to send data to ServiceNow, where they can create incidents, escalate issues, or trigger workflows directly in your ServiceNow instance. This integration streamlines your operations and ensures that critical issues are handled by the right team without delay.

• Custom API Integrations: If you use another API-based reporting system, Mutiny allows easy customization of webhooks to send alert data to your platform of choice. Whether you're using PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or another service, Mutiny’s flexible alerting system ensures your team is always on top of issues.

Efficient Alerting

Mutiny encourages a tailored approach to alerting, allowing users to set alerts that go directly to the experts. By ensuring that specific alerts are routed to the appropriate specialist (e.g., networking issues to the networking team, server issues to system administrators), Mutiny minimizes unnecessary noise and improves response times.

No False Alarms

We recognize the frustration caused by false alarms. To address this, Mutiny includes several features that ensure only relevant alerts are triggered:

• Root Cause Analysis: Unlike other tools that flood the helpdesk with alerts, Mutiny isolates the root cause of problems. For example, if a link to a remote office fails, Mutiny will only alert about the far-end router being down, avoiding confusion caused by multiple "down" alerts for all equipment at the site.

• Transient Suppression: If a transient issue occurs (e.g., a brief CPU spike), Mutiny can suppress alerts for a set period (e.g., 30 minutes), triggering an alert only if the problem persists.

• Escalation: Alerts can follow an escalation pattern. For example, after an initial alert is sent to the helpdesk, it can be escalated to a supervisor or manager after a set delay (e.g., 60 minutes).

• SMS Text Repeats: To ensure critical issues are addressed, Mutiny can send repeated SMS text alerts until the problem is resolved.

Thresholds and Reporting

Mutiny is installed with factory-set thresholds, but we encourage users to run the system for a period (e.g., a week) to establish their own baseline "watermarks" for normal behavior. Over time, thresholds can be adjusted to accommodate specific workloads or environments (e.g., a server running at 95% CPU usage all the time might be normal).

Additionally, Mutiny provides Tracked Views to ensure no events are missed. Alerts can be configured for any device within the nominated views, allowing users to monitor specific subsets of the network and system.

Integrating with Your Helpdesk

For an even more seamless experience, Mutiny integrates with helpdesk systems such as ServiceNow. Once an alert is generated, it can be automatically pushed to your helpdesk system, creating a ticket or incident and reducing manual intervention. This not only improves efficiency but also ensures that critical issues are tracked and acted upon promptly.

More details? See Mutiny Support Manual.