Day 11: Alert Types

30 Days of FrameFlow

Time to Read: 5 Minutes

FrameFlow Alerts

FrameFlow's in-app alerts are the default option in the "Notifications and Actions" section of the settings for your event monitors. With this option selected, you won't receive any external alerts. The results of event monitor runs will be recorded in the event history, but to view any alerts, you'll have to open the app. While this is useful for some event monitor data, for anything that requires immediate alerting, you'll need to create a notification profile.

Creating Notification Profiles

Notification profiles let you select a group of notification settings and give them a name. In your event monitors, you can then select a profile instead of having to re-enter the settings each time. When you change the settings in a profile, all of the event monitors using it are updated at the same time.

To begin, navigate to Settings > Notifications: Profiles and create a new profile. In the resulting window, enter the name of your new notification profile. Under "Status Control", you can choose the number of non-success tests the event monitor has to receive to trigger the notification action.

The "Add Action" button seen at the end of the above GIF is our next focus. With the resulting chooser, you can select from a list of over twenty notification actions. Each of these options has unique additional settings that complement them, so make sure to explore the full range of options. Note that you can have more than one notification action per notification profile. Don't be afraid to stack them!

Key Alert Types

Here, we'll go over some of our most quintessential notification actions and how to use them. You can mix and match alert types depending on the importance of the devices being monitored, or use different alert types to get notifications to different teams. The possibilities are endless.

Email Alerts

As the name suggests, FrameFlow can send you alerts to multiple email addresses notifying you of the status of your event monitors. We support Microsoft 365, Microsoft Exchange, Gmail, and also offer generic SMTP/POP3 settings. With this type of alerting enabled, your team will receive real-time alerts to their email inbox that notify them of current conditions.

Telemetry

Telemetry is an optional add-on service for FrameFlow that adds a companion mobile app with push notifications and cloud-based alerting. Telemetry is available for free to all customers with an active FrameFlow subscription. Using Telemetry, you can send standard SMS text messages to one or more mobile devices to raise the alarm about conditions that might need your attention. Telemetry can also call you on your cell or landline. It uses text-to-voice technology to read the alert to you so you know exactly what triggered the notification.

Note: Telemetry is available for free to all customers with an active FrameFlow subscription.

Call and Text Alerts

You can also receive calls and texts directly from FrameFlow. To send SMS notifications, an SMS/GPRS modem must be installed in the machine where the monitoring service is running. For call alerts, you'll need a voice-enabled modem. Because these types of alerts go straight to a user's cell phone, they're ideal to use with high-priority event monitors so your IT team knows about any issues even while on the go.

Slack and MS Teams

Both Microsoft Teams and Slack are popular workplace coordination tools. They help organizations around the globe keep in contact and coordinate actions. FrameFlow can send alerts directly to your Teams or Slack channels. This way, you don't even have to exit your team coordination tools to know what's going on in your FrameFlow configuration. You can even create separate channels that will be fed your FrameFlow alerts.

Creating a Triage System with Multiple Alert Methods

With all of these notification profiles and actions to choose from, it helps to organize your alert methods logically. Many FrameFlow users create a triage system based on the urgency of the alerts coming from each event monitor. For example, events that are of note but don't require action will be written to the event history, medium-important alerts will be sent to email, and high-priority alerts will warrant a cell phone call. This helps you keep your IT team focused on the most important alerts as soon as they occur.

Summary

Now that you know about some of the main alert types and notification actions, you're equipped to build an alerting system that's completely customized to your organization's needs. Tomorrow, we'll go over how to further customize your FrameFlow monitoring with just a bit of PowerShell.

Day 10: Dashboards

Day 12: PowerShell Scripting