What’s new with risk monitoring and how customers use it

Amy Chan — Thu, 19 Nov 2020 04:57:06 +0000

In our last software release, we introduced Bigleaf risk monitoring, our new feature that uses artificial intelligence to give you fewer, but more insightful and actionable alerts on network issues that pose a risk to your business.

Today I’m pleased to share some improvements we’ve made to risk monitoring.

But first, I want to say thank you to everyone who has turned on risk monitoring so far. And an extra big thank you to everyone who’s sent feedback to our product team at product@bigleaf.net and shared your experience or stories with our support team. (More on some of those later in this blog post.) You make these updates possible and better.

What’s new in risk monitoring

In this month’s release, we’ve continued to improve how Bigleaf risk monitoring assesses the health and performance metrics to provide guidance on how to address the issues that could affect your business and site’s continuity or uptime. Many of the updates included refactor how risks are calculated and how they are associated with companies’ sensitivity levels.

Based on the usage we’ve seen so far and the customer conversations we’ve had, this will further improve how we align the prescriptive nature of our risk monitoring with customer needs.

For more details on what’s changed with risk monitoring, check out the release notes.

How risk monitoring is already making a difference

As soon as we turned on risk monitoring, Bigleaf customers started to report a positive impact. Here are some examples of what we’ve already heard so far.

Discovering an important issue that hasn’t caused a problem yet

One of our customers learned something surprising: One of their circuits had been down for over a month. Because they had a second circuit that Bigleaf automatically failed over to using the same IP, they hadn’t noticed any issues with their internet connectivity and didn’t think anything was out of the ordinary during that time.

As soon as they set up risk monitoring, they immediately received the risk notification that their primary circuit was down. Had that not happened, they would have continued to pay for that down circuit and been at risk of incurring downtime had their remaining circuit failed.

Verifying the network is working as intended

On the opposite side of the customer story above, another customer was able to use Bigleaf risk monitoring to verify that one of their circuits was disconnected, as intended. They had disabled that line because of infrastructure changes they made due to the COVID-19 shutdowns. Bigleaf risk monitoring showed them that no traffic was going through that circuit. That gave them the peace of mind that things were working exactly as intended.

Recognizing small issues that are signs of bigger issues

One of our Bigleaf home office customers had a circuit that was issuing low level latency and packet loss alerts. However, they always seemed to resolve relatively quickly, and they happened in a seemingly sporadic fashion. So, the less technical home user didn’t think that there was a bigger problem at hand. However, when risk monitoring came online, this customer received a risk alert identifying the issues that happened more often than they should, and suggesting that she contact her ISP. When she did, she learned that her hardware had loose connections. She was able to upgrade to a new router and speed plan that worked better, and for a lower monthly fee.

Try risk monitoring and let us know what you think

To turn on risk monitoring, log in to your Bigleaf dashboard, go to your account settings, and create a new alert destination to turn them on. You may also see a pop-up prompting you to set up risk monitoring alerts, and you can choose that option, as well. For more details, check out our post on how to set up and use risk monitoring.

We’d love to know what you think! Send your feedback or ideas for future improvements to product@bigleaf.net. And as always, if you have any questions or need support, don’t hesitate to contact us.

Introducing risk monitoring

Amy Chan — Thu, 08 Oct 2020 03:16:45 +0000

So many of us suffer with a deluge of information, much of it unusable information. More than half the respondents to a survey of IT professionals dealt with more than 10,000 alerts per day, and 27% of all respondents received over one million alerts per day. Not surprisingly, the majority of respondents admitted they struggled to get through all the notifications and to figure out which actually needed immediate attention.

This is why I am pleased to announce the introduction of Bigleaf risk monitoring. This new feature makes use of artificial intelligence to filter alerts so only the important, actionable items will be prioritized.

Focus on the issues that pose a risk to your business

Instead of reporting on normal, individual network events — like your latency spiking every few seconds — Bigleaf’s risk monitoring isolates critical events that pose a threat to your business continuity and your site’s uptime.

Each risk alert is designed to give you a clear explanation and path to resolution so you can take immediate action. To support this feature, we’ve updated the Bigleaf dashboard to include a new overview, detailed risk view, and override rules for these risks.

The dashboard has a new widget that provides the number of risks a site currently has triggered and highlights the top three risks for that site.

The risks we monitor range from site outages all the way to looking at the mix of traffic across your different circuits. There are currently 12 risks we will calculate and report, including:

- Extended period of elevated alarm levels

- Circuit outage(s) that result in only a single circuit remaining

- Critical traffic volume exceeds the capacity of the backup circuits

- A site is down

Get fewer, more actionable alerts

With risk monitoring, you can expect to receive a lot fewer email alerts because you’re no longer being alerted for every single performance issue, however insignificant. Depending on your site, you could see as much as a 50% reduction in email alerts.

There’s no need to change alert settings to report only the most severe issues. While you can still adjust risk notification sensitivity, this decision is based on the level of business impact that concerns you most. You won’t miss any critical pieces of data, such as recurring, lower-level latency alarms, that could indicate a bigger problem.

Detailed performance information is a critical part of the troubleshooting path, but the context is also important. Bigleaf risk monitoring analyzes the context around patterns or potential impact, to answer the key question: “Do I need to worry?”

When the alerts and other information are presented without context, that forces us to try and build some interpretation model. Whether we use a tool or just figure it out in our heads, we need to filter out-of-context alerts and decide how urgent or important they might be, and whether they require immediate attention.

See what Bigleaf risk monitoring can do for you

To learn more about Bigleaf’s risk monitoring and actionable alerts, watch our recorded webinar or request a demo.

If you’re already a Bigleaf customer and you’re ready to get started with these new risk-based alerts, you can either follow the wizard when you initially log in, or you can go to your Accounts page in your Bigleaf dashboard and add a new alert destination.

And we’d love to hear what you think! You can share your feedback with me at product@bigleaf.net or opt in to early feature access for future releases.

risk monitoring – Bigleaf Networks