IT Outage Notification Solution

Frequently Asked Questions

• What is the best way to notify employees during an IT outage?

  Use a channel that does not depend on the system that is down. A high-priority desktop alert appears over the application an employee is working in, so the notice does not wait in an inbox that may itself be unreachable, and the same alert can reach phones for people away from their desks. Send it only to the groups affected, ask for acknowledgment on critical notices, and keep every update on the same channel.

• How do employees get outage alerts when email or the intranet is down?

  Delivery does not travel through the mail system. A lightweight agent on each computer holds its own connection to the DeskAlerts server, so a notice about an email outage never depends on the inbox nobody can reach. High-priority desktop alerts appear on top of other windows – even in Do Not Disturb mode – and, when the alert is set to keep trying, devices that were offline receive it once they reconnect.

• What should an IT outage notification say?

  Four things, in this order: what is affected, who is affected, what people should do right now, and when the next update comes. The last one matters most for the helpdesk queue – employees who know when the next update lands have less reason to call and ask. Ready-made wording for planned and unplanned scenarios is in our outage message templates, and drafts can be saved in the console for reuse.

• Can outage alerts be triggered automatically from our monitoring tools?

  Yes, through the documented REST API. A monitoring or ITSM system authenticates with an API secret key, which returns session cookies, and then calls the endpoint for creating and sending alerts (POST api/publisher/alert/create) with a JSON payload. The call is configured on your side, so you control exactly which events reach employees and which stay in the ticket queue.

• Can we notify only the affected office or team?

  Yes. Audiences are synchronized from Active Directory or Microsoft Entra ID, and an alert can be scoped to everyone, individual users, groups, organizational units, IP ranges, or specific machines. A regional outage can go to the IP range of the affected office; an application outage can go to the groups that actually use that application.

• How do we know who received and acknowledged the outage notice?

  Every alert produces per-person statistics – received, not received, acknowledged – and the alert report adds an open-rate figure, exportable to CSV or XLSX. With acknowledgment enabled, the recipient closes the alert only by clicking Acknowledge, so confirmation is deliberate. Anyone who has not confirmed can be sent the notice again without messaging the whole company a second time.

• How do we notify employees about planned maintenance and downtime in advance?

  Alerts can be sent instantly, scheduled for a specific date and time, or repeated on a cadence – daily, weekly, monthly, or a custom pattern – which covers the reminder sequence before a maintenance window. Pre-designed templates and saved drafts mean the recurring wording is written once and reused for each window.