Get control of the alerts you receive, rather than allowing the alerts to get control of you.

Editor's Note: This article is an introduction to the white paper "Modern Monitoring Methods for Power Systems" available free to download from the MC White Paper Center.

When you leave work at night, does work leave you?

You know the drill: everything is smooth and stable as you leave the office, and you have plans for the evening. Whether it is little Johnnie's birthday, a night out with friends, or your personal TV favorite, such as The X Factor, you expect to relax, but there is always something gnawing in the back of your mind.

You are having such a good time that you know something is going to interrupt it right at the most important point of the evening. Murphy's Law dictates it!

That's what it feels like if you have the wrong sort of alerts defined on your Power Systems server. The messages from those systems can interrupt your life at any time, spoiling your evening, interrupting your sleep, always present and ready to interrupt your plans.

However, it doesn't have to be like that. Despite the fact that we are now more connected than ever, it is not necessary to feel that just around every corner your server is about to leap up and shout "Critical Error" at the worst possible moment.

Alerts in the modern world should be a combination of modern delivery techniques, like using "smart apps" on mobile devices and using a sound strategy for volume handling.

This article will take a look at how we got to this point with such inefficient alerts, what we can do to alleviate the worry, and, ultimately, how we can get our lives back.

To learn more, download the white paper "Modern Monitoring Methods for Power Systems" available for free download from the MC White Paper Center.

Martin Norman has worked for more than 25 years in the IT industry, specializing in Systems and Security Management of the IBM System i platforms. Martin has performed consultancy and implementations in the UK and Central Europe, and for the last 10 years in the U.S., Canada, and the Caribbean, with particular focus on Fortune 100 and 500 organizations.

 

Martin is Technical Support Manager at Halcyon Software Inc., based in Philadelphia, where he focuses on helping IBM Power Systems users get the optimum performance from their IT business environment and the maximum efficiency and ROI for their operations.

 

A regular speaker at IBM events, such as COMMON and within the LUG network, he is also a contributor to a number of U.S. IT publications.