OnPage Critical Alerting with Microsoft Outlook

Let OnPage and Microsoft Office Monitor your Network

While it is well known that the Microsoft Outlook client allows you to use rules to forward emails, you might not have ever realized that you can use these rules to enable critical alerting. In fact, critical alerting with OnPage and Microsoft Outlook is easily enabled no matter what monitoring tools you use. Rather than having monitoring emails stop at your Outlook inbox, you can have these critical messages forwarded directly to your OnPage application.

Critical alerting with Microsoft Outlook and monitoring tools

In our previous blog on email integration with Outlook, we showed how based on various rules set up in Outlook, you could have emails from specific addresses or with specific content forwarded to your OnPage critical alerting application. Monitoring tools such as Nagios, Zabbix, Spiceworks and SolarWinds, among others, are based on sending email notifications to engineers when issues arise and reliance on these tools will only grow as time goes on.

IT executives are looking to decrease the budget spent on actual routine IT operations and move more budget towards innovation. This means fewer IT staff focused on monitoring. As one publication noted, there is a strong desire by “business executives to shift more IT budget and staff time to innovation, reducing the sometimes heavy outlay for managing routine IT operations. “ The result is that businesses will rely more heavily on monitoring tools to ensure the health of their operations.

By using critical alert notifications from OnPage, the shift towards increased monitoring can be gracefully handled. Simply send alert notifications from monitoring devices to Outlook and then have them forwarded to OnPage.

No more anxiety from waiting on alerts

One of our OnPage clients described the beauty of OnPage as being like ‘ordering a pizza but then not having to wait around for it to be ready. Instead, you get contacted when the pizza is ready!’ This scenario is directly applicable to what you achieve when you set Outlook to forward monitoring tool emails to OnPage. No more anxiety about missing an alert.

One major cause of engineer burnout is the stress of being on-call and the fear of missing alerts. By knowing you have Outlook constantly on the lookout for keywords and OnPage ready to deliver prominent alerts, you can relax a bit. Let technology take care of your worries.

Conclusion

The powerful and dependable nature of both Outlook and OnPage enable any alert email sent by a server will be forwarded to your OnPage account quickly and reliably. When monitoring tools are integrated with Outlook and OnPage, the tools’ ability to have critical alerts reach the right person is ensured.

Indeed, the outlook does look very rosy.