Do you know this situation? You are on-call and in the middle of the night you get a phone call. Loud enough to wake you up. Loud enough to wake your wife up, as well. You stand up and check your emails to see what the problem is. OK, you got it. Then you log on to the console of your monitoring tool and – green. Green? False alert? Why did you get the call then? After double-checking, still a bit sleepy, you recognize that the problem has been recovered automatically.

A new article in the September issue of German magazine LANLine (“Automation creates productivity”) summarizes typical challenges and problems in network monitoring very well and is worth reading. I would like to briefly discuss some of the problems addressed and how our product SIGNL4 was developed as a solution for exactly these problems.

SIGNL4’s core job is to reliably alert operational teams. However, we’ve been asked a couple of times if SIGNL4 can also monitor a website’s uptime. Well, we developed an app and it is now available in the SIGNL4 app gallery. You can now monitor the availability of websites AND get instantly alerted if is goes down. This can be set up in minutes. The new SIGNL4 app “Website Monitoring” checks the availability of a website and queries its URL in configurable intervals.

Our August update now makes it easy to assign team responsibilities for individual systems through our categories. This is no longer only possible by each team member in the mobile app, but can now also be done centrally in the web portal by the team administrator. All details can be found in this blog article.

Our July update brings new features to the email and webhook API’s. You can now close alerts in SIGNL4 when the issue was resolved in your backend system.

Richmond, June 15 2020 Today, Derdack, provider of critical alerting for operations teams, announced the availability of SIGNL4 in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace, an online store providing applications and services for use on Azure. Derdack customers can now take advantage of the productive and trusted Azure cloud platform, streamlined deployment and management.

With many companies utilizing remote-working during the COVID-19 pandemic, effective communication is more important than ever. Unfortunately, being in the middle of responding to a global pandemic will not prevent your organization from suffering from other business disruptions. Likely disruptions you may face are: Cyber/ phishing attacks – these attacks can cripple your regular communication methods such as email, or may exploit ineffective communications to extract illegal payments.

Our May update brings new features to our Signl Center in the web app and adds a new view that displays your upcoming duties to the mobile app! When part of an on-call duty team, your private life and work-life-balance are pretty much affected. Knowing about scheduled duties in advance and having such information at hand, can simplify things a little bit. That’s why we have added a new feature to our mobile app. The mobile app now displays the next 3 upcoming duties if those have been scheduled.

Our April update is BIG. It introduces emergency alerting to reach you entire team. We hope this will be a bit of humble support to your organization in this Covid-19 crisis. The core of this release is the new signl center, the new place to track alerts and their delivery in real-time, to see incoming events and how they are processed. You can now send emergency alert to your entire team with a single click.

SIGNL4 provides great support for geolocation information and in multiple ways. When a new alert with geolocation information is displayed in the mobile app, the app renders a map to visualize geographic information of the incident. A double click allows to open the default map application on the mobile device, e.g. to get directions or traffic information.