At the request of a client a few years ago, I helped design a real-time visual IT notification system that we now call T2 Alert Insight – showcased in the video above. The customizable LED display is the core innovation of the tool. To make IT teams quickly aware of system states and service issues, T2 Alert Insight provides customizable LED displays and email noficiation to clearly bring awareness to system states. The management console offers a central dashboard with information on current system states, a log of events and tools to customize alerts.
No other monitoring tool out there has a feature quite like it, and the capability allows for an easy way to instantly evaluate the state of an organization’s IT infrastructure. If there’s a serious issue signaled by the display, teams would then only have to open the T2 Alert Insight dashboard to begin resolving the problem.
Developing T2 Alert Insight
T2 Alert Insight was developed to meet the needs of Kootenai Health’s main campus in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, then a 254-bed hospital. The care provider was working with T2 Tech Group on a five-year IT ecosystem reconstructing project and saw the need to cut through alert fatigue and provide immediate visibility into IT issues. Kootenai’s CIO reached out to us directly and asked us if we could develop an alerting tool that would give leadership as well as the IT team reliable insight into the IT infrastructure’s status at all times.
Kootenai’s first idea was to develop a light system that they could use to quickly notify relevant parties of IT issues. We installed the lights, and they needed a way to control it. They downloaded a package to manually change light colors. Then, a problem would happen, and someone would change the lights. The manual process of switching the light colors became cumbersome, so they naturally wanted to automate the process. Then, T2 Tech had to make it so the lights would react to issues on their own, which was a capability nothing on the market had.
When we started the project, we really focused on implementing it in the helpdesk, and the tool used typical colors for basic states, such as green for all systems are fine, yellow for a warning, and red for an urgent issue. Then, Kootenai decided they wanted the lights in each cabinet of the data center. Along with that change, we made it so they could add as many controllers as they needed. They could even have the data center system states be displayed at the CIOs house if they wanted.
They didn’t like the green in the data center, so they asked if we could change the color to blue. Rather than changing the default from green to blue, we gave them the ability to create as many colors as they wanted. Instead of having just three states, the tool could now have as many states/colors as they wanted.
The whole project was about visibility. Within the care provider’s data center, the solution’s LED lighting system now illuminates each server cabinet with a customized Kootenai Health blue. If a system experiences an issue, the lights in the cabinet containing the problem system turn red to quickly identify the problematic system’s physical location. This has been a huge benefit to Kootenai Health. When issues arise, IT management and support teams are immediately aware of problems and can work actively to resolve them, even before users call in or submit a ticket.
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With T2 Alert Insight in a helpdesk or data center, the status of the IT infrastructure is literally embedded in the ambient surroundings. Just by looking at the LED displays that surround them, teams can be assured of a functioning environment, or they can triage a multitude of issues and immediately begin remediation on the most pressing problems. When monitoring a multitude of always-on systems, the alerts and LED display provide reassurance, security and clear issue resolution intelligence to leadership and their service teams.
If you would like a free demo of the product or would like to discuss it, please request a T2 Alert Insight demo.