Respond to Incidents Faster with iLert

by Blerim Sheqa | Jun 4, 2020

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iLert is an alerting and on-call management solution for ops teams and helps you to respond to incidents faster. It extends monitoring tools such as Icinga with advanced alerting through SMS, phone calls, and push notifications and lets you easily manage on-call duty with schedules and escalations.
iLert is a SaaS company based in Germany and has been an integration partner with Icinga for over 5 years. This blog post outlines some of the features by using Icinga along with iLert.

Why should you use Icinga with iLert?

The short answer is: to effectively handle incidents. Being a monitoring solution in the first place, Icinga addresses the most fundamental need to run any stable service. Without monitoring, you have no way to tell whether your service is even working. And if something is broken or about to break, you want to be the first to know it. And this is where iLert comes into play. A modern approach to incident response includes advanced alerting and on-call management. You can’t fix something, if you don’t know it’s broken, right?

How much time will you give yourself to respond to an incident, though? The answer is simple: it depends on the desired level of availably required by your business. Let’s assume you operate a consumer-facing service, which runs 24/7 and has an availability target of 99,95%. This would allow a downtime of 21.6 minutes per month. That is, if you have one outage related incident per month, you have around 20 minutes from discovering to resolving the incident. And you probably want to spend most of that 20 minutes on fixing the problem, leaving only a couple of minutes for the on-call person to acknowledge the incident.

iLert solves the problem of mean-time acknowledge by integrating with Icinga and extending it with advanced alerting through phone calls, SMS and push notifications as well as on-call schedules and escalations.

Reliable Alerting with multiple Alerting Channels

iLert provides multiple alerting channels, where you can acknowledge or escalate an incident on the same channel. Alerting channels include

Push notifications using the native iLert app for iOS or Android
International phone calls and SMS
Slack and Microsoft Teams
Webhooks
Trigger serverless functions on AWS, GCP or Azure

Priority and Support Hours based Notification Rules

iLert lets you define notification rules based on incident priority or support hours. That way you can use more obtrusive alerting methods such as phone calls for incidents that require immediate attention or happen during the night.

On-call Schedules and Escalations

iLert ensures that you never miss a critical incident and always notifies the right person using on-call schedules and automated escalations. Teams can easily manage their on-call schedules in iLert and swap shifts with the iLert mobile app.

MTTA and MTTR Reporting

iLert keeps track of the entire incident lifecycle and lets you report on important metrics like Mean Time To Acknowledge or Mean Time To Resolve.

How does iLert integrate with Icinga?

iLert is embedded through Icinga’s notification commands using a dedicated notification script, which is available on GitHub. Incidents in iLert are automatically closed once Icinga sends a recovery notification. Have a look at the integration guide for detailed step-by-step instructions.

Note: This is a guest blogpost provided by the creators of iLert. If you want to participate with a guest post on our blog, please reach out!