Alerts for On-Call person (Change weekly)

Question

Our SQL server admins have a group of servers they want to receive alerts on.  The warning level alerts will go to a distribution list email and the critical will go to the cell of the on-call person (will change weekly).  I am looking for the best way (custom properties, Alert Central) to handle this since we will need to change the on-call cell phone number every week.  Seems that to use custom properties would be difficult to maintain as the group wants to do the updating and I do not want to give them admin rights to manage custom properties,  A brief look at Alert Central seems to look pretty cool but I think at one time I was told it was a step backwards from the advanced alerting within SAM.

Anyone have any thoughts or suggestions??

Thanks

superfly · Answer

We use an external site for our oncall alerting. It's called opsgenie. So in Alert Manager I just put in the external opsgenie email address and then opsgenie sends it to the oncall person's mobile. You can program in a roster into opsgenie so you don't need to keep modifying it on a weekly basis. You must have to modify it if someone swaps oncall. Works pretty good.

muckman · Answer

You say Alert Central doesn't generate the alert but simply routes the alert. From my evaluation of AC it would accept incoming alerts from NPM and completely repackage the outgoing alerts with its template that cannot be modified or disabled. I would love for AC to simply route alerts as you say without molesting them. Is that possible?

pat_m · Answer

Hi we have a similar alerting scenario, so what we did was create a Dl in exchange and on a weekly basis we put the on call engineers cell number in it as a sms contact. This way when a critical alerts fires it sends to the dl and admins on the list get the email and the on call engineer gets the text message to their phone. In our case the 6 admins who rotate thru on call all have access to update the dl which is part of the engineer who is going off on call to remove his sms contact and add the engineer coming on call sms contact.