False positive monitoring alerts may seem harmless on the surface, but they can be very demanding on your IT staff. It usually isn’t possible to know right away whether an alert is legitimate or a false positive. This means your employee has to investigate the issue and escalate it if needed. The potential for two employees to waste several minutes of their time is always a possibility, and this time can add up when there are multiple false positive alerts any given day. Reducing these alerts is possible by adjusting your thresholds, analyzing your scripts and even outsourcing your network monitoring.
Study Your Scripts
When you study and evaluate your scripts thoroughly, you may be able to discover the root of the issue prompting false positive alerts. Your monitoring system may be using different scripts that provide different results and may be sensitive to triggering faults. Take a close look at your scripts and see if alerts are triggered when just one ICMP packet fails to return or if multiple failed returns are required to send an alert. Before you contact your 24/7 computer support service, the answers to your false positive alerts may be discovered in the scripts.
Customize Your Alert Thresholds
The next step would be to customize your scripts by adjusting the thresholds in which they are prompted to send you an alert. You don’t need to know when a single ICMP packet does not get returned, but it’s important to know if multiple ICMP packets don’t get returned in a short period of time. This is a good indication that something is wrong and requires intervention. Your 24/7 Managed Service Provider can help you adjust the thresholds appropriately so you only get notified when a significant issue has occurred.
Outsource Your Network Monitoring
The most common way companies eliminate the headaches of false positive monitoring alerts is outsourcing those services. A network monitoring service will constantly adjust thresholds and evaluate scripts so your systems and networks operate as efficiently as possible. You won’t receive nearly as many false positive alerts, which means your team can focus on the important tasks they have to complete without wasting time.
Single Point of Contact provides IT support for small business owners who want to take their network security to the next level. Our network monitoring services make IT security easy for business owners since we do a lot of the leg work behind the scenes. Our goal is to allow you to focus on growing your business and we want to grow alongside you. False positive monitoring alerts can be annoying and frustrating, so contact us today for assistance on eliminating them.
