How can I fine-tune my alerts for maximum efficiency?
Alert fatigue—we’ve all been there! The problem with too many alerts is that important problems can be hard to see if you need to look for them in between other notifications that aren’t relevant and actionable to your business. Here are some tips on how to fine-tune your alerts and get the most value out of your Auvik notifications.
One point of caution before you get started on fine tuning alerts—ensure that you always look into whether or not the alert is being caused by a legitimate issue before making changes to the alerts. For example, a High Interface Utilization alert could be caused by a backup saturating a 1 Gbit/s port, or it could be caused by a port connected at 10 Mbit/s when it should be connected at 1 Gbit/s. The action required for each of these situations is much different.
The following tips will involve editing your alert settings, which can be done either at the Organization/multi-site level to apply to all child sites, or at the site level to apply to only that site.
Find additional information at this link: How do I edit alerts?
How can I change how often the alert notification is sent?
When editing an alert, you have the option to define its “Email Frequency”. This setting controls how often email notifications from the alert are sent out to users about this particular alert. If the alert triggers multiple times within its email frequency, those alerts will be bundled together into 1 email notification. Note that this option doesn’t affect other notification channels such as webhooks or PSA integrations.
How can I adjust the alert trigger condition?
If you find that an alert entity is meeting its trigger condition quite often, you may want to fine-tune these values to something more beneficial to your monitoring.
For example—if an alert is monitoring usage on an interface but you know that particular interface is often quite busy, you can edit the alert and increase the amount of usage required to set off the alert.
How can I adjust the alert clear condition?
If you find that an alert entity is hovering very close to its trigger and clear conditions, you may want to change the alert so the trigger condition and clear condition are not as close together.
For example—you have a device whose storage is constantly hovering around 80%, and an alert set to trigger at >80% and clear at <80%. You can edit the alert and set the clear condition to a lower number, like 70%, to confirm that the issue is fully addressed before the clear condition is met.
How can I exclude devices from alerts?
If you have a device or type of device on the network that you don’t want monitored by a certain alert, you can exclude the device or device type from the entity field of that alert.
Find additional information at this link: How do device and interface search and selection work?
How can I disable alerts that aren’t being used?
Not all service providers monitor all devices, so sometimes you may want to disable certain default alerts. For example, if you don’t want to monitor your customer’s printers you can disable any printer related alerts.
Find additional information at this link: How to disable an alert?
How can I tie Auvik’s alerting into my PSA?
By integrating Auvik into your PSA system, you can choose exactly which alerts you’d like to receive tickets/notifications for. You’re also able to build business logic into the alerts from within the PSA, such as separating out alerts for clients on 7x24 monitoring contracts and 5x8 monitoring contracts. Or, if you only want to see Critical alerts, you might choose to only push those alerts through to your PSA.
The link below has some information about setting up various PSA integrations with Auvik:
Third-party integrations with Auvik
Why am I getting frequent device up/down alerts?
If you’re getting frequent device up/down alerts but the devices in question are still online, it’s likely that the device is dropping the ping requests—this can happen if a device is very busy. In this case you can alter your health check settings to increase the number of failed pings required to flag a device as “down” by editing the related health check.
Find additional information at this link: How do I manage device health check frequencies?
Why am I getting repetitive alerts?
If you find that the same alert is triggering quite often—rather than simply silencing it, it’s recommended that you investigate the root cause to see if there are any potential issues that need to be actioned. If you have any questions about a particular alert, please feel free to reach out to Auvik support.