Welcome to Web-Based Alerting
Those of you following our flurry of beta announcements for NPM v12 may have noticed a long requested feature make an appearance- Web Based Alerting
We didn't just move alerting to the web however, what you'll see in the beta is a new alerting engine written from the from the ground-up. We've retained much of the flow and styling of the previous alert manager, so you'll feel right at home with the new interface.
While there is more goodness on the horizon for alerting (stay tuned to NPM beta announcements) we wanted to take a few minutes to go over some of the exciting new features. Without further ado:
Manage Alerts in the Web
One look at the new "Manage Alerts" grid tells you this isn't just a port of the old Advanced Alert Manager to the web:
Notice the "Action Manager" tab? Actions may now be edited independently from Alerts. Perform bulk edits, Test / Simulate actions, import / export / etc:
Right from the first alert-creation screen, you will notice some new functionality:
That's right - alert severity and custom properties. Imagine all the fun you can have with a new set of CPs. 
Expect to see more fun things on the "Trigger Conditions" page, but the big new feature you'll see in beta is the ability to build conditions off of multiple object types:
Want to combine nodes and applications in an alert? Done.
Our Time-of-Day scheduler is improved in the beta as well:
Are you currently creating multiple alerts for different time ranges? No more.
New / improved alert actions are starting to surface in the beta as well:
You may notice the addition of "Change Custom Property" action. Need to flag something out of service, or change a CP for evaluation in another alert? The possibilities are endless:
If you happen to configure a "Play Sound" or "Text to Speech" action, you may notice an option to download a new "Desktop Notification Tool":
Not only will the tool play sounds / speech on your local machine / NOC system based on alerts, but has the ability to ACK as well.
Email actions also now have "Secondary SMTP server" option for redundancy:
Finally, before you submit the new alert definition, the beta will give you a sanity check to make sure you're not about to spam your entire team:
More exciting alerting improvements to come. If you're interested in staying on top of the action, get involved with our beta program. Details and link may be found here: NPM 12.0 Beta3 Now Available
Not ready for that sort of commitment? 
We'd love to hear your thoughts below.
