One of the big things about alert management is managing who sees what and when.
And one of the weird things about working in technology is there can be glaring parallels between personal (romantic?) relationship dynamics and work dynamics.
So while I'm wondering if I should mention to my fiancee that my college girlfriend's uncle invented something I still use every day, or that feathered shoes give me the screaming heebie jeebies, I'm also wondering if I should give senior management realtime updates on the database server that crashed, or just orchestrate a periodic filtered update.
A manager I worked for just over a decade ago liked (demanded) the realtime updates, and wanted to review them line by line *during* any situation (real or perceived). Any of you who've used tape backup software may know why that wasn't a situation I minded getting out of. If you're restoring on one tape drive, the backup streams can't use it. Just like if you're asking me to recite a logfile to you, I can't really address the problem that causes that logfile.
I'll tell you a bit more about what I've seen and how I live today, and then put it out to you for your thoughts, wishes, givens, and druthers.
In my current environment, we have aliases that get used for various things. There are customer aliases (end users of our services), engineer aliases (the people who write the services), support aliases (the people who clean up after the engineers), and probably some top secret upper management aliases that I don't notice on a daily basis. There's also a couple of monitoring dashboards that pretty much any employee from the new guy learning subversion (1) to the CEO in Southern California can have access to on request.
We get a bit mixed up sometimes, and sometimes the inner workings discussions go out to the customer alias in reply to problem reports. Not that it's a big secret that something's broken, but we're expected to know everything and people worry when we don't.
And sometimes, we forget that there are a smattering of mid-to-upper management on the support aliases, and while some of them are (or have been) technical, the further you get into management, the less you filter for your fellow managers.
So ideally, you'd have a firewall between the technical details and the management awareness of the situation. Maybe a manager who can do the translation, or a program manager, or an intern with a liberal arts degree and a really good Halo score. I was a little of each (but without the Halo score) a couple of jobs ago, and tried my best to keep upper management from swooping down on my minions (see "recite a logfile" above). I wasn't always successful, but when I was, my team was very effective and efficient. I felt like a javelin catcher, but that's part of being a manager.
So now it's your turn.
- Where do your alert notifications go?
- Do you have a filter between you and end users, upper management, your web site's front page, etc?
- How's that working out?
- And finally, what would you change in your environment if you could, in terms of notification? (You might want a kegerator but that's not really pertinent here)
Thanks to everyone who's been participating in the topics I've brought up this month. If you haven't commented on the earlier posts yet, feel free to go back and take a look. You get 50 points on Thwack and an entry for the iPod Nano contest at the end of the month for each Ambassador conversation you join.
- This escalater [sic] has temporarily become stairs (3/18/2013)
- You do love oncall duty, don't you?(3/11/2013)
- Let's just eliminate alerting altogether, okay? (3/4/2013)
Also check out my Thwack Ambassador colleague this month, Jeremy Stretch. Same points and entries!
- Cataloging network discovery information(3/18/2013)
- Network exploration(3/11/2013)
- Exploring a new network from scratch (3/4/2013)
And check me out elsewhere if you like.
- I blog at rsts11.com
- I'm on Twitter as @gallifreyan
Thanks, and have a page-free week!