We often see questions about how to template alerts. In Grafana, you can template information about your alerts with custom labels and annotations, and you can also template how notifications look and what information they contain with notification templates. Many users confuse the two, despite being separate features with different use cases.
When it comes to time-sensitive events, instant, reliable communication is key. In the past, pagers were relied on for quick communications as they allowed people to communicate on the go and without access to a landline. But today, the availability of cellphones has made the portability of communication devices a standard feature, and communication technology has advanced significantly, begging the question – What is the use for pagers today?
Several challenges impact customers and operations of utilities and energy companies, including aging infrastructure, cybersecurity threats, inclement weather, operational failures and transmission interruptions. These challenges can cause prolonged service disruptions, potentially leading to customer attrition and irreversible damage to businesses. Responding quickly and efficiently to incidents is critical to minimize damages or contain potentially dangerous scenarios.
Shouldn’t your alerts be doing more of the work for you? A noisy channel with every alert from hundreds of monitors and microservices is a chaotic place to actually find the incidents that are impacting your customers. And it still requires a heck of a lot of human intervention. We think it’s time for something better. Today we’re releasing Alert Routing: the next phase of worry-free automation from FireHydrant.
