Alarm fatigue occurs when engineers or professionals are exposed to an excess of alarms in their work environment. Imagine getting up to hundreds or even thousands of notifications and alarms per day. Due to the excessive amount of information you have to process all the time, you will become desensitized to these alarms. It is also called alert fatigue or notification fatigue.
In today’s society we are faced with important developments like IoT or 5G which are causing an exponential increase of data. In many cases, this is an excellent development which enables companies to perform better by increasing their knowledge and decision making with data insights like performance, trends and maybe even predictions.
Important to keep in mind is that the rapid increase in data is causing a rapid increase of alarm notifications. This increase is directly related with the increasing risk of alarm fatigue. This development can be affecting you negatively. After all, you would not want to become desensitized to the alarms that actually matter. Chances are high that you are familiar with the story of the boy who cried wolf. If you apply the story to alarms, you would not want to be that much desensitized to alarms that when an alarm is actually important, you do not react to it. Luckily, there are some ways to prevent alarm fatigue.
5 solutions to prevent alarm fatigue
As a company with expertise in data collection, data processing and all the way up to dashboarding, we know what is causing alarm fatigue. We noticed that our customers faced the problem at an alarming rate, and have developed our TripAiku software solution to help our customers prevent alarm fatigue. We will explain 5 solutions how you can prevent alarm fatigue.
1. Using advanced prioritization
When it comes to alarm monitoring and being exposed to the notifications, it is essential that you are able to focus on the alarms that matter the most. We have developed our TripAiku engine with an advanced 2-stage weighing algorithm to ensure that the most important alarms are the one you will get to see. This allows you to save a lot of time by being able to focus on the alarms that truly matter and not wasting time on irrelevant alarms. Rules can be pre-defined and adapted afterwards to ensure the right person gets the right notifications. This increases workflow, reduces stress and prevents alarm fatigue.
2. Alarm clustering
When you have many separate notifications, it can get overwhelming in just a small amount of time. By combining the different data sources intelligently with alarm clustering technology, you will have more overview because repeating alarms and related alarms are all being clustered to just one notification. TripAiku is able to cluster it together, reducing the total amount of notifications and providing you with a better overview.
3. Auto-close tickets
When working with networks, large amounts of data are being generated and stored. The generated data is then converted into the alert notifications. When notifications or tickets are being created continuously, the total amount of them is increasing. While prioritization and clustering is helping you to focus your time more on the important notifications, auto-closing tickets is important to implement for saving time. As soon as an alarm is no longer relevant because it is solved or the notification is outdated in the meantime, having an advanced auto-close mechanism is cleaning up the leftovers for you. This reduces the total amount of notifications in your workflow management system, thus increasing your overview and further decreasing the chance of focusing your time on outdated tickets or notifications. Our TripAiku engine has auto-closing of tickets integrated to help you clean up the notifications.
4. Multi-vendor integration
If your network consists of data generating hardware from multiple vendors, chances are high that you will not always be able to integrate them all in one dashboard or overview. Besides reducing your overview of events and alarms by not providing a single pane of glass (a unified display that presents data from multiple sources), it takes more time because you have to switch or look at multiple independent dashboards. Alarm fatigue is reduced by integrating all the events in just one overview, further allowing you to focus on the important events – no matter from which source it is coming from. This makes sure you do not have to keep multiple tabs or apps open at the same time and allows for the combination of alarms into just one single type of notifications. This is yet another example of how TripAiku can help you with preventing alarm fatigue.
5. Enhancing your workflow management systems
Workflow management systems are effective in what they do – managing the workflows. When it comes to the monitoring of alarms and notifications caused by data from for example networks, you would greatly benefit by using enhancement engines like TripAiku. Due to the open-source build of TripAiku, we can integrate it with your existing workflow management system to enhance your total performance and prevent alarm fatigue from happening.
If you have any additional questions about alarm fatigue or TripAiku, please do not hesitate to contact us. We are hosting a Webinar on network monitoring which also covers the subject of alarm fatigue on May 18th.