On Call Techs and WHD

I would check out Alert Central - our free product that I think will fill your gap. Alert Central - Free Alert Management Software by SolarWinds

We are attempting to do this - we have various rotating on-call schedules for ticket assignment. Unfortunately, this creates as much chaos as it attempts to resolve since the two products are not closely integrated, leading to managing tickets in multiple locations.

Couldn't agree more - the integration is piecemeal at best.

We also do not use Alert Central... for now. That will come later once we have more in place.

We setup a work around by setting a rule for each tech that is scheduled to be on-call so when it comes time for their shift we activate their rule and deactivate the one coming off the on-call shift.

Just an idea.

~Q

Getting the same feedback from our team.  Do not like that they have two systems to check.  What we setup was when I tech was not available (either outside their scheduled working times, or on vacation), the ticket was routed to the Group Manager.  We setup a Tech called Alert Central and made that tech the group manager.  Web Help Desk sends the e-mail to the address we setup for Alert Central.  A source rule in Alert Central reads the Web Help Desk e-mail looking for key words (like Request Type) and then picks a group and user from the group's calendar.

What occurs is Alert Central sends the e-mail with information from the Web Help Desk e-mail.  The assigned user (tech) then needs to acknowledge the Alert Central request, then sign on to Web Help Desk, find the ticket and assign that ticket to themselves.  Now this doesn't appear that much of a burden, but when you are asking people to do this while out of the office, at home, getting woke up, etc.  I can see the pushback is valid.

If integration between WHD and Alert Central is not possible, (it is isn't it?), I would like to see adding an On-Call checkbox to WHD.  At least then with this in place, an algorithm could be setup to collect all techs in a group that are on-call and make the assignment to one of them (round robin or load balance).  I have put in this suggestion as a feature request.

We have it set up to text all 5 of us anytime a ticket with the status of "Urgent - Will Page All of IT" comes in, but we use the free Android Klaxon app so that the audible alarm only goes off for the person who is on call.  We've used this system with WHD for 4 years, and it works great.  It would be nice to manage it centrally within WHD, but not necessary for us.