Error Notifications: How to Get Notified of System Failure

Monitoring data is essential to many IT-related business decisions. On an operational level however, getting promptly notified of business impacting problems can make the difference between a minor hindrance and disaster. Error notifications are of particular interest to system administrators because system errors can often cascade from minor to severe in the blink of an eye.

Independent Error Notifications

Whether by email or other messaging system, error notifications must be received promptly and, perhaps most importantly, received independently from the system being monitored. Many monitoring solutions on the market offer notification mechanisms to their users but if those monitoring solutions are installed on premise, they may themselves be affected by a system error and fail to notify the appropriate resources.

A good example of this trap is monitoring an Exchange server where notifications are sent from the very same Exchange server being monitored. Yes monitoring data can be retrieved and analyzed at will, but if the Exchange server goes down, how will the notifications get sent? This is precisely why most monitoring solutions recommend (or require) being installed in parallel to the network with separate hardware just for the monitoring solution.

Cloud Architecture Advantage

Parallel installations are recommended for two reasons: (1) the resource consumption of the monitoring solution may be prohibitive to existing infrastructures, (2) error notifications must be promptly expedited regardless of the failure.

SentinelAgent bypasses both these problems with its unique agent-based cloud architecture. SentinelAgent’s worker role is off-loaded to the cloud with data from the locally installed agent, and because notifications are sent from this worker role, the delivery mechanism is independent of any local network failures.

As long as notifications are set to be delivered to an external email address outside the local network, there’s virtually no chance SentinelAgent can’t expedite error notifications to the right resources.

Get notified. Maintain continuous access to monitoring data. Lower your mean time to repair (MTTR) – all without investing in extra hardware or software.