Mastering IT Alerting: A Short Guide for DevOps Engineers
$575 million was the cost of a huge IT incident that hit Equifax, one of the largest credit reporting agencies in the U.S. In September 2017, Equifax announced a data breach that impacted approximately 147 million consumers. The breach occurred due to a vulnerability in the Apache Struts web application framework, which Equifax failed to patch in time. This vulnerability allowed hackers to access the company's systems and exfiltrate sensitive data.
A single incident or downtime can cause substantial damage to a company's finances and reputation. This is where IT alerting comes into the picture, serving as an integral part of any enterprise's incident management strategy. This short guide delves into the intricacies of IT alerting and its role in incident management.
What is IT Alerting?
IT alerting is a method of sending automatic notifications to administrators, network operators, incident commanders, or on-call teams that an IT incident has happened or is about to happen if no action is taken. These notifications can have various formats and aim to ensure prompt attention to potential incidents, such as server downtime, system errors, or security breaches. If you want to understand the difference between alerts and incidents, we recommend reading the article "IT Incidents vs. Alerts."
Here are the key stages that are required to establish a proper IT alerting system.
Monitoring. Before the IT alerting system starts working, you have to establish continuous monitoring of the IT infrastructure. This includes servers, networks, applications, databases, and other critical components. Monitoring tools actively check these systems for performance issues, malfunctions, security breaches, and other anomalies. Some well-known IT monitoring tools are Icinga, Zabbix, SolarWinds, Prometheus, and Datadog.
Detection. The monitoring tools are configured to detect specific conditions or thresholds that indicate a problem. These can be performance metrics (like CPU usage and memory consumption), error messages, failed processes, or security alerts (like unauthorized access attempts).
Alert Generation. Once an issue is detected, the monitoring system generates an alert. This alert is a notification that something has gone wrong or is about to, based on the pre-set conditions or thresholds.
Notification Mechanisms. The alert is then communicated to the relevant IT personnel or teams through various means such as email, SMS, push notifications, automated phone calls, or integration with incident management systems. The choice of notification mechanism often depends on the severity and nature of the alert. We will cover when it's time to consider the incident management system later in this article.
The Role of IT Alerting in Incident Management
In essence, IT alerting forms the backbone of any effective incident management strategy. An alert can be considered the first line of response to any incident, signaling the relevant specialists to address the issue quickly. In fact, the efficacy of IT alerting in incident management can be gauged from the fact that it can lead to a 60% reduction in mean time to repair (MTTR).
To help DevOps teams prioritize actions, alerts are categorized by severity levels, such as critical, high, medium, and low. Critical alerts might indicate system outages or security breaches, while lower severity alerts might be used for performance degradation or non-critical system errors.
Decentralized IT Alerting vs Incident Management Platforms
Depending on the size of the company and the complexity of the IT system, businesses may choose between decentralized IT alerting via separate tools and channels and a centralized incident management system. Monitoring tools provide simple ways to establish and maintain alert functionality that fits the needs of small teams and early-stage companies. But as more services are introduced to the IT infrastructure and communication requirements are growing, decentralized IT alerting functionality becomes an issue itself. Here's a checklist of when it's recommended to consider an incident management platform to ensure you don't miss critical alerts.
Checklist: When it's time to switch to an incident management platform
- Growing complexity of operations. As a company grows and its operations become more complex, the likelihood and impact of incidents increase, necessitating a structured approach to manage them.
- Growing complexity of IT infrastructure.
- Increased frequency of changes to production systems. The more changes and updates are introduced to the system, the higher the risks of incidents are.
- Regulatory compliance requirements. Certain industries are subject to strict regulatory requirements that mandate implementing incident management processes to ensure compliance and avoid legal penalties.
- Need for improved coordination and communication. If a company struggles with coordinating and communicating effectively during incidents, an incident management platform can provide structured processes and tools for better collaboration.
- High-risk environments. Organizations operating in high-risk environments (like manufacturing, chemicals, or energy sectors) need robust incident management systems to respond to potentially hazardous situations quickly.
- Integration with other systems. The need to integrate incident management with other business systems (like HR, operations, or security) indicates the need for a dedicated platform to streamline these processes.
The incident management platform serves as a central hub that connects alerting with other essential incident management tools such as on-call schedules, status pages, incident automations, and more. In essence, if IT alerting is akin to an airplane steering wheel, then the incident management platform can be thought of as a pilot's cabin.
Conclusion
In 2023, Royal Mail — the UK's postal service — had to halt international operations due to a cyber security incident. The network connectivity issue caused extended downtime for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft 365 in the same month. IT Glue, Oracle, several Google services, Cisco vEdge platforms, and many others experienced severe IT incidents — during just one year. All those incidents had very different causes, but all the same had extremely costly consequences.
The identification and management of IT incidents are critical to maintaining an organization's operational efficiency and reputation. As the basis of any effective incident management strategy, IT alerting plays a massive role in signaling DevOps specialists to address and prevent costly downtime and potential damage.
Regardless of whether an organization chooses to implement decentralized IT alerting or a centralized incident management platform, both serve the aim of minimizing system disruptions, protecting sensitive data, and maintaining the company’s overall digital health. In a nutshell, mastering IT alerting is not just a nice-to-have skill but a must-have for any organization striving to maintain resilience in this ever-evolving digital era.
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