Synthetic Monitoring
Part 2 of 3-Part Series. Part 1 here.
Skeptical about creating a monitoring strategy? Don’t be. Your business will get much more out of your monitoring services if you put more work into developing and implementing a clear strategy. In fact, the key to quickly and effectively restoring service after a disruption is to follow an established strategy that identifies problems early and notifies the employees best prepared to resolve the issues at hand.
3 Strategies to Remediate Service Disruptions Quickly And Effectively
- Satisfaction with Monitoring Strategy Correlates with Ability to Remediate
- Set Smart Alert Thresholds
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Direct Alerts to the Right People
Satisfaction with Monitoring Strategy Correlates with Ability to Remediate
According to a survey by Big Panda on the “State of Monitoring” in 2017, businesses that were able to resolve 75 percent or more of their alerts within 24 hours reported satisfaction rates of “48 percent satisfied” to “21 percent dissatisfied.” In comparison, businesses that were able to resolve just 25 percent of their alerts reported rates of “7 percent satisfied” and “37 percent dissatisfied.” This tells us that businesses satisfaction rates with monitoring services correlate to alert resolution ratios.
Set Smart Alert Thresholds
In essence, monitoring is all about maintaining optimal platform performance while minimizing the draw on employee time and resources. This means that establishing well-defined criteria for issues will help identify the problems that matter most and eliminate extraneous alerts so your employees can focus on the platform issues that really need their attention. It’s about finding balance: Too many unnecessary alerts will hurt your satisfaction rate and waste time, whereas alert thresholds that are too low will allow problems to slip through.
Establishing alert criteria is a custom process that depends on the platform, and typically requires the involvement of developers, IT, and QA all working together. It’s also an ongoing process, so the involved parties will need to meet every few weeks to adjust alert criteria as needed. Optimal alert thresholds will help your business resolve a higher percentage of alerts and improve service satisfaction by making the amount of alerts more manageable.
Direct Alerts to the Right People
After the monitoring team determines the criteria for the alerts, the group should determine the party best-equipped to resolve the alert issues. Addressing the alerts to the right people significantly cuts down on the time it takes between issue and resolution. This practice prevents alerts from having to work their way through a chain of employees to get to someone who can address the problem.
Directing alerts also means that when an employee receives an alert notification, they know the alert is relevant to them. This way you can avoid all-too-common situations when employees start ignoring alerts because they receive too many irrelevant ones. Additionally, staff will spend less time filtering out any unnecessary alerts they receive.
The survey found that 73 percent of reported developers built monitoring into their code, 70 percent implemented a root cause identification process, and 60 percent recognized that developers are active in supporting applications — all of which are important factors in a company’s ability to address alerts. If your business is just getting started with monitoring services or looking to develop a better monitoring strategy, contact Apica today.