emergency notification

emergency notification system

Introduction

A modern notification system is a combination of software and hardware that provides a means of delivering a message to a set of recipients. For example, notification systems can send an e-mail when a new topic has been added to Wikipedia. The complexity of the notification system is often reflected by the types of emergency notification messages that must be sent. A simple e-mail noting when a page has emergency notification hospital been inserted into Wikipedia is perfect for that problem domain. However, notifying individuals when a building is on fire would require real-time interaction, escalation, scheduling, rosters, and fail-over scenarios.

The rest of this text examines common features of advanced notification systems.

Notification System Features

Real-time Interaction

In the event of a fire, or any emergency situation that requires human intervention, notification systems must provide a way of accepting feedback. The feedback can be used to determine what tasks the system should perform. For example, a Chief Firefighter, when notified of a pending fire, must acknowledge that the truck is en route, thus eliminating the need for further notifications.

Escalation

The criticality of emergency notification systems an event might change before the event is finally resolved. Sometimes a small failure may trigger a chain of failures that can lead to events that require immediate attention. For example, an e-mail that fails to send is not a significant error, and may be classified as a warning. However, the original incident that noted the e-mail failure may spawn a ping emergency notification device for the elderly of the mail server responsible for relaying the e-mails. If the ping fails, the event may emergency response notification cisco systems emergency notification system be escalated to a severe level, to indicate that emergency phone + email notifications a more important issue emergency notification phone message service earthquake requires resolution.

Scheduling

When deciding the list of recipients to notify of an event, a notification system might take into consideration the hours in which a recipient can be notified. Someone working a midnight shift may be available for handling emergencies between 11:00pm and 7:00am. The system should make no attempt to notify this person emergency notification software outside of those hours. A notification system could take into consideration vacation times, weekends, holidays, and so forth, to prevent notifying people when they are not available.

Rosters

If emergency planning notification a notification system cannot contact the intended party, often it is not sufficient to let the matter drop. In the previous example, the Chief Firefighter was informed of a pending fire. However, if the Chief was assisting a tree-bound feline, the notification might not reach its target. Consequently the system must find another person to notify, typically by scanning a predefined roster.

Fail-over Scenarios

High availability means that a system must be up and running 99.99999% of the time. The only acceptable downtime is for upgrades, which must be kept to an absolute minimum. To achieve the goal of high availability (HA), software-based notification systems must take into consideration the failure of hardware upon which they are running. The hardware failure could be as simple as someone accidentally unplugging a network connection, or as messy as a harddrive crash. The "brains" of the notification systems are often distributed across separate physical machines to ensure that if one machine is no longer available, another system can handle sending and resolving new events.

Interaction Media

The number of ways a person can interact with technology increases with each passing year. Advanced notification systems support at least one, sometimes all, of the following communications media:

• Voice (telephone, cellphone, VoIP)
  
• Pager (SMS, SNPP)
  
• Instant Messaging (Jabber, MSN, ICQ)
  
• E-mail (POP, IMAP, SMTP)
  
• FAX

Industries

Notification systems are used throughout the following industries:

• Financial institutions (banks, stock brokers, credit manitoba emergency notification notification of emergency management partners system unions)
  
• Emergency services (police, fire departments, ambulance)
  
• Manufacturing (computer hardware, motorcycles, television)
  
• Information Technology emergency notification equipment cisco systems mass emergency notification (help desk, networks, software monitors)
  
• Weather (storms, earthquake, tsunami)
  
• Government
  
• Education

External Links

There are a variety of notification systems available, each with varying degrees of complexity. This section provides external links to some of the more common notification systems available.

Commercial

• AlarmPoint Notification Server from Invoq Systems, cheap emergency notification Inc.

Open Source

• Nagios: A host, service, and network monitoring application