Notifications

The Notifications system in WinGate has been designed to make sure that when a particular incident occurs during WinGates operation, there is a plan to notify an actual person to the fact that it has taken place. The Notifications system allows you to create a schedule of notification events (a notification plan) that will be executed in a defined order when a chosen incident occurs.

e.g. Sample notification plan:

1. Email office manager (1 minute after the incident)
2. Email the administrator (5 minutes after incident)
3. Email the Supervisor (10 minutes after the incident)
4. Email the CEO (20 minutes after the incident)

Incidents

An incident is a term used in WinGate to describe the moment when a set of specific conditions can arise during its activity. WinGate allows you to define exactly what will constitute an incident. When they arise, incidents are reported to the Notifications system and their primary purpose is to activate a specified notification plan. Several WinGate components such as the Policy and Data modules have configurations that allow you to create incidents.

Notification plans

When you create a notification plan, you are creating a schedule of events that will be executed when an incident has been reported to the Notifications system (and activated the plan).

These custom notification events will be the steps taken by WinGate in response to the incident being reported. Like other events in WinGate, each notification event that you create in a plan is registered with the Events system. Once registered, the notification events are made available to the various WinGate event processing systems to respond and deal to whenever the event is executed.

This means that you could have the Send Mail event processor send an appropriate notification style email, or have the WinGate Policy system (an event processor) perform an action like stopping a service or running a process, whenever the notification event is executed in the notification plan. This widens the scope of a notification plan from just executing pure notification type events such as email or alerts. It allows you to use the power and features of any WinGate event processor to design an effective response whenever an incident is reported and the plan is initiated.

Managing incidents

When a notification plan is initiated, the Notifications system provides several controls for managing the incident that activated it. To control the level of escalation of the notification plan (i.e. how many notification events are executed by the plan) the incident can be acknowledged or closed by someone using the WinGate Management console at any time after the incident.

Acknowledgment of an incident allows for a suspension period in the schedule of the notification plan. This suspension period gives someone some time to resolve the issues that caused the incident, before any further notification events in the plan are executed.

If the incident is not closed during the suspension period, then the rest of the notification events in the plan are executed as normal. If however the incident is closed, then the notification plan will cease to execute any of the pending notification events it has left.