Monitoring service that has a human component?

Wed Dec 5 22:58:46 UTC 2018

For my 9-5 we have a company that has a 24/7 NOC that watches all of our
boxes. They CEO is in the US and the NOC guys are seas. They are generally
very responsive. It's very affordable (about $200.00 per box per month).
These guys work real well but they are sort of work in the Box. We need to
give them guidelines. For example we do telecom and clients get hit with
fraud all the time. There are times where we know it's 90% fraud and we
want them to shut it down, there are times where there is a 50/50 chance
that it's fraud. If the system thinks there is a 90% chance it emails them
"Fraud call from X to Y". They then have a procedure on how to figure out
based on the call record who the client is and they shut them down. If it's
the 50/50 chance they get an alert "POSSIBLE Fraudulent call from X to Y".
For such a call they have to go through a series of checks before they shut
them down. What I am getting at is they aren't good at figuring out what is
fraud but are very good at following rules and doing exactly what you ask
of them. What ever technology we use they learn it (be it OpenSips,
Asterisk etc.). We do need to tell them exactly what to monitor and what to
do for specific alarms.

If you want an intro let me know.

On Wed, Dec 5, 2018 at 5:40 PM John Von Essen <john at essenz.com> wrote:

> Whats your budget?
>
> The outsourced NOC firms tend to be expensive (I've looked at them for a
> project), and they are also not that fast, so dont expect someone to
> determine if an alarm is valid within a few minutes, instead, in goes into
> their queue and waits for a tech to pick it up, so it could be 30-60 mins.
>
> In a perfect scenario, using freelancer/gig-economy people should be able
> to get this done quickly, but its needs to be sizeable to start and will
> involve alot of logistics, which means money.
>
> To be honest, the best option may be to hire a developer to custom code
> really good logic that eliminates a good deal of the false positives so
> only a handful make it through.
> -John
>
> On 12/5/18 5:01 PM, David H wrote:
>
> Hey all, was curious if anyone knows of a website monitoring service that
> has the option to incorporate a human component into the decision and
> escalation tree?  I’m trying to help a customer find a way around false
> positives bogging down their NOC staff, by having a human determine the
> difference between a real error, desired (but different) content, or
> something in between like “Hey it’s 3am and we’ve taken our website offline
> for maintenance, we’ll be back up by 6am.”  Automated systems tend to only
> know if test A, or steps A through C, are failing, then this is ‘down’ and
> do my preconfigured thing, but that ends up needlessly taking NOC time if
> the customer themselves is performing work on their own site, or just
> changed it and whatever content was being watched, is now gone.  So, the
> goal would be to have the end user be the first point of contact if it
> looks like more of a customer-side issue.  If they can’t be reached to
> confirm, THEN contact NOC, and unlike email alerts, keep contacting until a
> human acknowledges receipt of the alert.
>
>
>
> Thanks
>
>
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