Notification content

[Brian Bergin]

As we're all limited to 3 or 4 sites this isn't a problem but if we have dozens this will be a problem.  Notifications only use the site ID not the customer name and having to look up the ID will take too long.

Event Details:

Event Id		1666720
Event Type		MON.BANDWIDTH
Event Time/Date		2010-06-24 06:14:31
Event Message		Service Network Performance on host Thunderbolt Network Manager Appliance (192.168.1.111) CRITICAL at Thu Jun 24 07:14:26 EDT 2010 - WARNING: Jitter of 21.038ms exceeds threshold of 20ms,
Customer ID		1058.ciscovar.com
Device ID		00:1A:70:8D:AC:4E

I'd like the Customer ID to either be replaced with the customer name -or- supplemented with a new row that says Customer Name.  Also, perhaps you could include a link on either the Customer ID or the Customer Name to take you directly to the customer page in the portal after you log in.

[Marcos Hernandez]

Added to the Feature resquests list.

Thanks,

Marcos

[dcorley]

Also, another good argument for scaling the trials up... number customers per partner and number partners. We wont know what we dont know until we scale.

Also, points to need to review SMS content optimization. Because of the SMS message length limitation, perhaps we need to consider a customer name "abbreviation" that can be delivered along with the specific customer ID. I'd argue that you need both in the SMS and can do without some other detail. Maybe a five to eight alphanumeric character string created by the partner/agent. We'll have to figure out what drops out of the current characters delivered, but knowing the identity of the customer without referring to a numeric ID table will be important for those not equipped with Smart phones. Presumably, Smartphone users can bworse to the mobile UI and correlate received evevnts more deeply. But, for the foreseeable future, SMS on non-smart phones will be a prevalent mobile device so we must optimize content delivered in the message.

Dave

[Brian Bergin]

I'm happy to deploy more units if you guys want.

As for SMS content, why not give us variables that we can create our own notifications with?  We use IPSentry (ipsentry.com) and we can customize our notifications using variables to allow SMS to fit in the 160 allowed characters.

[dcorley]

Great idea, Brian.

Marcos, can you add that to the list of PF items? We'll also want to work through scenarios involving non-baseline notification services. Use our current SMS/email/twitter as "baseline" notification. Offer an advanced option to allow partner to configure content delivered to partner-specified notification service. Presumably this will require user authentication credentials to be provided on each notification service access attempt...much like what we do for Connectwise.

Any other notification services out there other than IPSentry?

Dave

[Brian Bergin]

IPSentry isn't a notfication service it's a network moitoring tool that we can configure to send out customized notices via e-mail, text, etc...  when defined conditions arise.  We use it to monitor systems, drive space, event logs, specific services like SQL, DHCP, DNS, HTTP, etc...  It's quite powerful.  They even have temperature monitors that you can install to monitor temperatures in your server room.

[Marcos Hernandez]

I will be happy to add this to the requirements list, but what "variables" exactly are we talking about?

Marcos

[Brian Bergin]

Right now the e-mail notifications contain a lot of info I really don't care about and some that should be there (like the customer name!).  For SMS, all I need to know is the customer name, Event type, machine name/IP address.  Date/time stamps "might" be needed, but your phone should give you a time stamp anyway that's close enough and once you log into the TB portal you'll get more details.  Basically, I need enough info to tell me where to go next not the entire problem description.

[dcorley]

Thanks, Brian. So, is your request to provide a notificaiton delivery option, _similar_ to IPSentry's to select/acccept TB-provided event input parameters, translate these to fit SMS constraints - under the config control of partner/agent?

Dave

[Brian Bergin]

Yes.  Giving us the ability to control what info is sent via SMS for different events would be very helpful.  With 160 characters for most SMS providers (mine actually allows 4x that much as they will break a longer message into 4 different ones) you need to be VERY picky on what info is sent, enough to know who the customer is and what the basic alert is.  The rest can be gotten when you log into the portal.

[dcorley]

What we might consider is offering the option in this advanced notificaiotn feature of delivering an SMS notificaiton in two separate SMS messages - correlated to the same event ID. Not exactly what your SMS carrier does, Brian, but generic enough to provide specific AND beefy content. Our support org is likely to get calls from parters based upon SMS texts alone. The support team will have post-process access to deliivered notifications as long as the unique event ID and customer ID is in the text. So, there are some components of the SMS that we will have to include that you may not necessarily use as important data for diagnosis and remediation.

Appreciate your comments.

Dave

[Brian Bergin]

That's just it, SMS is "Simple Messaging Services" not beefy.  Any message sent to a phone needs to be a short and sweet as possible.  If I want to get lengthy messages I'll have it send to an e-mail I check on my phone not just SMS.

[Michael Holloway]

Thanks Brian, good feedback here.  I think we understand how you want to see templates for different contact methods and the need for them to be customizable, including tokens (variables) in the messages that can be used in the customized contact method message, something like:

%%event_type%%

or

%%host_display_name{san10}%%

which could optionally {} strip any spaces (s), only include (a) alpha and (n) numeric characters, and limit to the first X (10 here) characters of the resulting message.

If this is what you are asking for, then the default template for an SMS contact method could look something like:

%%notification_options{160}%%%%customer_name%% - %%event_type%% on %%host_name%% at %%event_timestamp%% (%%event_id%%)

Does this sound about right?  I'd think this would be an 'advanced' option when customizing the contact method, and we could provide default templates like above for each type of contact method.  The default email template could be much more verbose.

-mike

[Brian Bergin]

Sounds like a plan to me...