Getting started with Alerts

Alerts are critical enablers in the proactive journey of IT support teams. They allow teams to detect issues and help them prioritize their efforts to improve the digital employee experience (DEX).

How can alerts help you detect and diagnose issues?

Nexthink Alerts notifies you about issues that require swift action by filtering the noise so you can identify situations that require actual user intervention. Use alerts to identify situations where something has unexpectedly changed or occurred.

Detect issues impacting multiple devices

Proactively monitor issues that impact multiple devices or incidents of sudden degradation.

Number of devices or users with issues

Detect whether a certain number of devices or users experienced an issue.

For example, the system triggers the alert when more than 20 devices had a boot time of over 60 seconds, during the past 24 hours.

Frequent issues across devices

Monitor the values of any metric across multiple devices. Detect whether an aggregated metric value has breached the defined threshold or shifts by a specific percentage.

For example, the system sends an alert when the number of crashes of any binary increases by 100% in relation to a predefined norm, like the average of a metric value over the last 7 days.

Refer to the Detecting issues impacting multiple devices page for more information.

Detect issues impacting a single device or user

Monitor issues on a single device or for a specific user. Send separate notifications for each device or user.

For example, the system triggered an alert for each device that had at least 2 system crashes during the last 24 hours and created a ticket in the ITSM software on behalf of the user.

Nexthink limits the total number of objects that trigger the same alert to 500, avoiding alert flooding and keeping the required relevancy of individual alerts.

Refer to the Detecting issues impacting a single device or user page for more information.

When to use alerts and when to use data exporters?

Do not use alerts for reporting purposes that do not require immediate assistance or action. For example, to Report all devices with low disk space, Data Exporter capabilities are more suitable.

Use data exporters to report on a large number of objects that meet specific condition criteria that you can express with an NQL query, or if you expect that the system might trigger more than 500 alerts at the same time.

Additionally, use the data export scheduling option to export data on a regular basis. Refer to the Data Export page for more information

What is the difference between an alert and a monitor?

Alert

An alert is a special type of event triggered when specific conditions are met for the performance metrics of different features of your IT infrastructure, for example, system crashes, load times, or failed connections. The system sends alerts in the form of an email or a webhook notification informing your IT teams about issues occurring within your organization. Triggered alerts are visualized in the timeline on the Alerts overview page.

Monitor

A monitor is a component of the Alerts and Diagnostics module that you can configure to evaluate metrics against defined conditions and trigger alerts to identify specific issues. With monitors, the Nexthink platform offers anomaly detection capabilities for IT environments and allows you to notify users accordingly.

Refer to the Managing Alerts page for more information about monitors, monitor types, and how to create them.

What are the permissions required to use alerts?

To enable proper permissions for Alerts, as an administrator, do the following:

Select Administration from the main menu.
Click on Profile from the navigation panel.
Click on the New Profile button to create a new profile or edit an existing profile by hovering over it and clicking on the edit icon to change the profile configuration.
In the Permissions section, scroll down to the Alerts section to enable the appropriate permissions.

Refer to the Profiles page for a detailed description of the possible options.