Improving Mirth Alerts: Request for Feedback

[brendanh]

Mirth Corporation plans to make significant improvements to Mirth's alert subsystem in an upcoming release. Mirth alerts are already very powerful and we've recently received great feedback to make them even better.

The following list itemizes the features we have received so far.
Please have a look and let us know if there are additional features that you'd like to see.

We really appreciate your feedback and it will help Mirth be the best interface engine available!

We'd like to thank MedSphere for providing the bulk of this feature list. MedSphere has also agreed to directly fund Mirth Corporation to develop a good portion of this functionality and we greatly appreciate their support.

Please get in touch with us at mirth@mirthcorp.com if your organization has suggestions in the area of alerting or monitoring within Mirth or is interested in assisting fund this -- or other -- improvements to Mirth. Direct funding can be a very efficient and cost effective way to help Mirth adapt to your immediate needs. Of course we and the whole Mirth community greatly appreciate all forms of contributions (code, documentation, testing or otherwise) that go towards making Mirth the best interface engine out there.

Here's the list:

Global monitoring:
- Channel state monitoring (Started, Stopped, Paused)
- Channel processing monitoring (is the channel locked up?)
- Connector state monitoring (Busy, Disconnected, Initialized, etc.)

Metrics based monitoring globally and by channel:
- No messages received in x amount of time
- Too many messages received in x amount of time
- Number of queued messages has reached x
- Number of errored messages has reached x
- Number of errored messages received in x amount of time
- Number of filtered received in x amount of time

Message exception monitoring:
- Severity of exceptions definable by user
- Severity threshold for a given alert
- Specifically choose what exceptions to alert on

Advanced Scheduling of alerts:
- Times of the day
- Days of the week
- Dynamically assign alertee's based on time

Alert dispatch timing threshold:
- Prevent dispatching the same alert multiple times in succession
- Specify a threshold in which a channel can send the same alert

Dispatching Methods:
- Keep simple dispatching method we have now (email and SMS)
- Add ability to route an alert to a channel for processing to other endpoints

Transformer Alerts:
- Beef up the API to include these features so that the same functionality is available within a script

Template:
- Use values from rules defined in the alert in the error template

Escalation:
- Define a period of time that alert has to be "deactivated" before it is escalated and sent to another recipient

Post edited by: brendanh, at: 12/08/2008 18:02

Post edited by: brendanh, at: 12/08/2008 18:03

[baziz]

When will these feature be available in Mirth?

Will these new feature be available in Mirth 1.8,
Mirth 1.9, or Mirth 2.0?

What is the release schedule for
Mirth 1.8?
Mirth 1.9?
and Mirth 2.0?

[albertosaez]

This options seems great.

Another one: the ability to send the alerts as input for a channel.

This way, yo could use all the power of Mirth to do what you want with the alert info (ie: send it to a WS to send a SMS).

[brendanh]

Alberto, thanks, but that is already planned under Dispatching Methods:
- Keep simple dispatching method we have now (email and SMS)
- Add ability to route an alert to a channel for processing to other endpoints

If you can think of more, please post. We want it to encompass all possible use cases.

Baziz, there is no schedule planned for any of those events.

Post edited by: brendanh, at: 12/16/2008 10:16

[quimicefa]

Please, consider to add to the "Metrics based monitoring globally and by channel" the "low level alert" (I don't know how to call this).

I.e: you may receive an alert message if there are too much messaging speed between 2 systems, but also if this speed is too low. Normally this is caused by a network, power failure ...etc

[rts]

How about:
1. Disk space / free space alerting (if disk reaches 80%+ of capacity)
2. Database monitoring/alerting
3. Ability to shutdown a channel based on severity/number of times an alert has been activated
4. A "TEST" button on the smtp configuration that sends a test email and displays responses from the SMTP server

[Antaris]

Hi guys !

Is there a comprehensive and complet list of all the variables for the "Alert Template" ?

For the Alert Template :

• It could be also very useful to set the mail parameters that is going to be sent, like : (maybe in order fields)
  • Subject
  • A dynamic list of emails (not hardcoded into the right side list)
  • A "total javascript template" in relation with the context of the error (raw message content, etc)

Thx

Best Regards

Antaris

PS : I also and agree with "rts" for the "SMTP Test Button", a must have to verify the config ;-)

[brendanh]

Great stuff guys, we will definitely consider these during implementation!

[akasman]

I was just looking through a list of alerts you are planning to add to Mirth. I think this is a great list and it covers most of alerts needed in interface monitoring. I do have one additional suggestion for alert:

- Alert if a message cannot be sent after X sec/min or a message is sitting in a queue longer than X sec/min

[baziz]

Hi,

I really need these alart features.
When will next upgrade be released?

thanks,
baziz