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[OPEN] Rotating On-Call email calendar scheduler

Votes:

7

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User Story

As a PRTG User and network technician, I want to be able to have alerts and alarms sent to specific people during certain times.

Details of User Story

I and 3 others rotate on an on-call schedule, taking 1 week at a time. We want to be able to have PRTG send the current on-call tech alarms and alerts so they can get started on solving them. We want the other 3 on-call techs left alone at that time.

Right now we have a central email account that alarms/alerts are sent to that all 4 of us can check. Additionally, we each have our own email accounts that ping our phoned etc.

We are looking for a way to set up a calendar so every week, the corresponding co-call tech changes and receives the alarms/alerts as they come in, while still sending the same emails to the central account.

Acceptance criteria

Specifics can be changed so long as the end function performs similarly.

- Calendar or weekly rotation (may be worth setting custom time duration if other users have weekends off etc) of predefined "on-call" users/email accounts - Alarms are emailed to both the "on-call" and central email accounts - Non on-call technicians in the schedule do not get emails unless they are the active on-call tech.

Status

Open

add-feature alarm alerts calendar on-call prtg-kbtracker rotating

Created on Dec 20, 2018 7:03:48 PM

Last change on Dec 21, 2018 7:16:42 AM by Stephan Linke [Paessler Support]



Best Answer

Accepted Answer

Votes:

1

Yes, that was my initial thought as well. Have the mail server set to forward emails based on a weekly rotating order.

Text file with 4 lines. Each technician is on it's own line. At the end of the week, the top line moves to the bottom and the rest move up. The alias is assigned to a "head" script to read the top line of the on call list.

The trouble comes in when the schedule needs changed. As it's not a real calendar, it's fully manual to move things out of order or if someone needs to swap a day or two.

With the mail setup we're using it turned out being less straight forward but I'm sure we can get it working outside PRTG.

Just added the suggestion in case others might want that functionality/if it wasn't too difficult to put in.

Created on Dec 26, 2018 3:25:34 PM



2 Replies

Votes:

0

note published for a nice different point of view :)

Hi Dylan,

The target-mailbox can easily be changed with something like a forwarder that you control directly on the target-system (exchange) - or actually each Tech that is ending her/his week - they sure gonna make sure they won't get those forwarded anymore.

In Slack you could just create a group and you join and leave the group as needed - or mute/unmute it. Something similar should be possible in Teams.

Adding this to PRTG seems like a nice idea - but I am afraid of the added complexity - I rather handle this on the target system (email / chat / etc.) then in the source. There might be even more systems sending such stuff - most of them don't have the ability to adjust those things either.

It is a nice idea - but I think it would be to much overhead - may be I am wrong and it would be better then thought and I end up loving it :-) In any case - just wanted to give you a few ideas how you could handle it as well.

Regards

Florian Rossmark

www.it-admins.com

Created on Dec 21, 2018 2:52:45 PM

Last change on Dec 26, 2018 3:09:34 PM by Stephan Linke [Paessler Support]



Accepted Answer

Votes:

1

Yes, that was my initial thought as well. Have the mail server set to forward emails based on a weekly rotating order.

Text file with 4 lines. Each technician is on it's own line. At the end of the week, the top line moves to the bottom and the rest move up. The alias is assigned to a "head" script to read the top line of the on call list.

The trouble comes in when the schedule needs changed. As it's not a real calendar, it's fully manual to move things out of order or if someone needs to swap a day or two.

With the mail setup we're using it turned out being less straight forward but I'm sure we can get it working outside PRTG.

Just added the suggestion in case others might want that functionality/if it wasn't too difficult to put in.

Created on Dec 26, 2018 3:25:34 PM




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