On the Alerts tab within the device interface, you can configure the delivery of the device alerts.

Alerts Groups

You can create and configure custom notification groups with different types of alert addresses to receive alerts.

In the Send Alerts to Group(s) section, you can assign one or more alert groups to the monitored device. To add a new address, click the Add Group button and select the necessary check boxes.

To enable an alert for a group based on the duration of an error, select an error duration time in the Escalation field for this group.  The alert will be sent to the selected group only if the error condition persists during a specified time. The escalation time intervals range from immediate to three hours and are available in 10-minute increments. For details, see the Escalation article.

False Positive Check

When an error is detected, we run a series of checks to ensure it is not a false alert. Those checks may take some time, depending on the error type and the number of tasks in the device. This may cause some delay in downtime alerts.

You can disable False Positive Check to ensure immediate downtime alert, but it may result is some “false” alerts. For more details, see False Positive Check.

We recommend NOT disabling the False Positive Check.

Uptime Alerts

To receive notifications when a device begins successfully completing tasks after a failure, select the Send Uptime Alert check box. For more details, see Uptime alerts.

Alert Filter

To determine how monitoring alerts are processed or displayed, select filter in the Alert filter field to apply to alerts.

Only one filter can be assign to a monitoring device.

Alert Throttling

In the Minimum Number of Minutes Between Alerts fields, you can set the throttling option.

By default, the system will send an alert every time the error is encountered. In instances when you have a device with high monitoring frequency, you may receive a lot of alerts in a short period of time. To reduce the number of alerts that will be sent, use the Alert Throttling functionality.

To adjust the number of minutes that will elapse before the system generates another alert, select the necessary value in the related address type field.

How to set a custom alert throttling time

To specify a custom time value for the Alert Throttling option, click in the necessary address field and enter hours and minutes. Use the following input formats:

  • <X> hr <Y> min 
  • <X> hr
  • <Y> min

As an example, let’s say the monitoring frequency for a device is every five minutes. By default, you will receive an email alert every five minutes for as long as the device is down. You can override the default by setting a longer period, which will decrease the number of email alerts for device failure. To receive a down-state email notification once per day, enter 24 hr in the Email field. In this case, you will receive an alert once per day until the device state changes to UP.

If you need to temporary disable alerting for up to 24 hours, you can set Alert Silence from within the Device Manager on the device action menu . The device will be still monitored on the regular basis but you won’t receive any notifications on the errors till the end of the silence period.

If you want to stop alerting for longer than 24 hours, you can use one of the following strategies:

  • Postpone monitoring. You can disable monitoring by manually applying Postpone action from within Device Manager or set up the Schedule option to disable monitoring for a set period of time.
  • Configure a group alerting schedule to exclude particular days or time intervals from alerting. The alerts will not be sent to the group specified for alerting according to the scheduler. To create a new schedule, follow the recommendations from Configuring a Schedule. In the example below, the alerting of the specified group will be disabled for 6 days, while monitoring will be still active.