Automic Workload Automation

I need to trigger a phone call when a job fails in Automic.  We are currently using ifttt.com do to this, but ifttt is free and has no SLA or meaningful support necessary for us to feel comfortable running operations with it.

What do you use to notify people that they need to get up in the middle of the night?

Some backstory, if you're interested:

We do not have 24x7 coverage, and need to wake the on-call support person when something goes wrong.  We've all been issued iPhones - this means no complex notification rules like you have with blackberry.  Our only choices in this regard are either have all notifications set to very loud and likely be woken unnecessarily or else use Do Not Disturb mode.  DND will silence e-mail and other notifications, but allow phone calls through.  We've found that this works pretty well, when it works.  As mentioned above, ifttt has no SLA and occasionally just doesn't work.  I need to move our team to something that can be relied upon, either a cloud service or other application that can wake sleeping resources.

We use the Notification object and send an appropriate email message using the PUT_ATT(_APPEND) CALL_TEXT.  The message is sent to an Outlook mail list that our support staff are subscribed to.  Most of the staff have Androids and can filter their incoming messages to be disturbed or not.  Some of them control the notification by removing or adding themselves to the mail list's distribution.

I have no familiarity with iPhones but would assume that it has similar functions.  I am aware that a few of the staff have iPhones but do not know what technique they use.

Best I can tell, iPhones have none of that functionality.  You either let everything through, nothing through, or just phone calls through.  Thanks for your input.

Slow day so a quick search produced Using the Do Not Disturb feature on your iPhone which has the following -

After that, you can customize DND in a couple very useful ways. First, the “Allow Calls From” feature lets you filter calls and texts. Your top three options are “Everyone” (which defeats the purpose, so… why?), “No One” (good for misanthropes), and “Favorites.” You’ll probably want the third: late at night when everyone else’s calls go to voicemail, if your best friend has a flat tire, they can still reach you. However, you can also choose another group. This is useful if you lead a double life, and don’t want to hear from your grandmother, pastor, and pediatrician at certain hours, but really don’t want to miss a text from your therapist, drug dealer, and booty calls.

Another use useful feature is “Repeated Calls.” If you toggle this on, people who call repeatedly will get through, if they place two calls within three minutes. This is handy if, say, your friend is calling from a pay phone at a gas station. It’s a way of raising the odds that someone who really wants to reach you after hours will be able to.

Again not being iPhone literate, it sure sounds like it might work if you are not going to use the Notification object method and manipulating the recipients list.   You could consider the "repeated Call" option and use the Notification object's Escalation to place a second call if it's not responded to after the first.

I am not sure about phone calls but you can send a text message using email. Since a notification object can send email you could use that to send email as a text message to a phone. This website has a outline of how to do it:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/27051/use-email-to-send-text-messages-sms-to-mobile-phones-for-free/

Basically in the notification object you would define the phone number as the recipient. For example a sprint number would look like this:
mobile-number@messaging.sprintpcs.com

Mark - you're right, repeated calls can get you past the whitelist with that option - but it still requires a phone call.  Don't believe it works for emails or SMS.

Ian - that is good to know on SMS generation; I can see where it would be useful. However, SMS notifications are blocked by DND mode - so I'm in the same boat I was in before - either I let all alerts though every night, making for an unpleasant sleeping experience, or I somehow generate a phone call in conjunction with DND mode on the iPhones.

We send SMS alerts and emails, and I would love to also do a phone call but without spending an arm and a leg (I'll research ifttt).   There are also products like PagerDuty, but we can't justify the expense.

We only send SMS alerts when the oncall person is expected to respond immediately.  Otherwise we just send an office email to be addressed the next day.  We did this by setting up different alarm objects, one for each team/priority-level.

I have setup a rule in my outlook to forward the job abort mails to mynumber@vtext.com. So, when a job fails I get a text message and I have set the notification loud and long for text messages on my S5. All email alerts are set to silent.  So when I hear the custom ring I know it's a job abort.  Since I do not get any unwanted text, it works just fine for me.

We use a cloud solution called xMatters.  While we don't initate it directly, I think it could possibly be used like that.  We have ours integrated with our ServiceNow instance which is integrated with our notification objects. 

All notifications we use have a script that will automatically create a ServiceNow ticket and assign the tickett to our 24/7 Operations group.  If they can't resolve the issue or if it is critical, they will then reassign ServiceNow ticket and then click on the oncall button which will then initiate the notification process which is determined by the individual users.  It helps the operators so they don't have to keep trying to contact people as it can contact the secondary and so on.  The oncall list can support a rotating oncall schedule too.  I personally have it call my desk phone during work hours and sends an email and text message immediately.  If I don't respond within one minute, it will then call my cell phone.  You can include delays and additional devices, i.e. a home phone.

Mark Hadler said:

We use the Notification object and send an appropriate email message using the PUT_ATT(_APPEND) CALL_TEXT.

Can anyone point me to a primer on how a newbie would go about implementing this within Application Manager to email alerts on any abort?

I know this is an older post but I have an update for anyone who is interested.

We have recently started a project at Automic Software to use our Automation Engine to trigger phone calls when an urgent case is created after hours. So far, our demo has been a success in that we are using the Automation Engine to call users. We are using the Twilio API to make the phone calls which is around $0.015 per call:

https://www.twilio.com/

Twilio has a very sophisticated and robust API which allows the execution of XML or PHP to determine how Twilio handles the call. In our case, we simply have the Automation Engine executing our RA REST Web Services job which then calls the Twilio API and tells it what number to dial and what the automated message should say. If anyone is interested further please let me know. I'll will be writing this up in a bit more detail within the upcoming weeks as well.

Hope this helps!

I am SUPER interested to hear about the details here, but I will go to the website and take a look first.  Thanks for posting this - we do not have a 24x7 operations team so I've been trying to figure out how to notify people after hours besides using email.  Please keep us updated!

I was successful last year in implementing an ifttt solution.  Each target person is registered into ifttt under their work email address and set up with a recipe to accept an email from AWA that translates the email into a voice call.   This solution is costing us $0, but I also consider it to be a brittle solution since ifttt could change without warning.  That being said, it has been working quite well for us.

I also took a hard look at PagerDuty, which seems to be a real cadillac cloud based solution.  It allows each target person to customize how they want to personally be contacted and they can set their own escalation rules.  But it is not inexpensive and would require each person to take the time to learn the product and customize it for their needs.