Tuesday, May 27, 2008

The value of visual monitoring systems

It still amazes me how many clients I still sit with at lunch or at a business meeting, where their pager or cell phone goes off and without even looking at the message just clear it. Then they will smile and say "stupid monitoring system". I've started to joke with them that they must have stock in Duracell. Is the monitoring system stupid, or is it the way they are using it?
The reason people ignore the messsages is because of false arlarms. Why are they false to begin with?

The whole ide of of paging people is great to get their attention while they are out and about. With technology advancements in cell phone, why are we not using more of a visual alerting capability. When is RIM (makers of BlackBerry) going to step up to the table and give us some visual icons to alert us IT folks of systems issues. It can tell me I have a text message or voicemail. How about a disk full or critical application failure? A few simple icons that in a glance I could see whether i need to look at the alter details or not.

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