Glossary A–ZLetter A
Alerting
Alerting means that a management system sends a message to the people responsible on its own initiative when a fault occurs, instead of waiting for someone to check.
Typical triggers are a device that has stopped reporting in, repeated errors or a full storage drive. The message is usually sent by email, sometimes through an interface to a ticketing system.
In screen networks, alerting is the part of monitoring that acts. An example: a player in a branch has been silent for more than 30 minutes, so an email goes to whoever looks after that branch. A second message once the device is running again is useful, so that nobody sets off for nothing.
Operators should set thresholds so that brief network dropouts do not trigger a message, and should take scheduled off times into account. Anyone who receives too many alerts soon stops reading them. It matters just as much who receives the message and who responds at the weekend. Alerting only detects what the system itself can see: a screen that is connected but stays black for another reason will not always be noticed this way.