Enrichment of alarms

Why enrichment of alarms?

Compose IT has spent a total of more than 600,000 hours building competence in IT Operations with the largest customers in the Nordics.

With the enrichment of alarms, you get a detailed alarm picture that provides great advantages in handling alarms for, for example, an NOC operator. This means faster and easier handling of alarms.

Enrichment can be done for several reasons. More information may be needed in the alarms so that the NOC operator can get a better understanding of the meaning and help with what should or should be done. It can also be the case that alarms are enriched with control data that tells the system how the alarm should be handled, who should see it, what impact the alarm has or which CI and CI class the alarm belongs to.
Probably and in most cases, several types of enrichment are needed to get an optimal IT Operation.

A large amount of alarms is difficult to overview, it is also difficult to see a connection between different types of alarms, alarm types, alarm groups, priorities, etc.
In order to fix the alarms, the NOC operator often has to look for information from different places, e.g. binders, lists, various databases, we also see that it can be completely dependent on the person, this means that the alarms are fixed in different ways due to incomplete information about the alarms or that the alarms are read incorrectly.

Enrichment of alarms makes it easier to understand the alarms and makes the NOC Operator make the right decision in a shorter time and get a better overall picture of the alarm situation.
An example of how enrichment can be used:
You manage a number of servers in a network. In the network, you have installed a function that monitors the uptime of the servers. If a server cannot be reached, an alarm is sent that the server is not reachable
to the alarm list. The enrichment process automatically retrieves the information that belongs to the alarm and displays this together with the alarm in the alarm list.

In a more complex environment with many connected devices, systems and applications, the need is even more critical to get as much information as possible related to the alarm so that the right decision can be made by the operator.

The content of an alarm from a monitored device, application or service often only describes the alarm at a simpler level. Information that you want together with the alarm is often missing and you know it is in other systems.
With the enrichment of the alarm, the limitation is bypassed by combining the contents of the alarm with information retrieved from other systems.

Enrichment of alarms is something that we at Compose IT pretty much always do with our customers, precisely because it adds value to all alarms and because it is only the imagination that sets limits to what you can enrich alarms with.

In the picture below, we see the result from one of our customers who has just installed NetCool and has started working with alarm enrichment.
It becomes clear to the customer’s Operations how they are doing with Certified Events and, above all, they can see overtime how many alarms lack Certification.