Minimize WSS unwanted Maintenance Notifications

Products

• Cloud Secure Web Gateway - Cloud SWG

Issue/Introduction

 

WSS administrators can get notifications via email and/or via the WSS status page (https://status.broadcom.com/services/web-security-service)

Administrators getting huge amounts of WSS notifications alerts, where messages can often be duplicated (if registered via the WSS status page too)

Administrators receiving maintenance notifications for the sites they do not subscribe to e.g. an admin is notified of US maintenance activities when they only connect to data centers in Europe

The effectiveness of the alerts are minimized through the volume of updates - operations can potentially ignore a change of importance

 

 

 

Cause

Duplication of messaging on Status page and Portal emails, where Portal emails include all maintenance activities. The status page can be filtered to receive subset of notifications.

Plan is to reduce number of Portal email updates and have all administrators register on status page

Resolution

The status page provide options to filter maintenance alerts per GEO or Data center location as shown below - this can be used to reduce the overall number of alerts coming into the Administrator via the status page - simply select the GEO locations or data centers your users connect to and only receive alerts for these locations. Note that in the unusual event of a data center going down and subsequent auto failover to another data center, users may get sent to data centers that an admin may not have registered for. Please take this into consideration when filtering.

 

 

Admin's though may still receive emails through the automatic Portal updates. To avoid getting alerts through this channel, a WSS administrator can unsubscribe to notifications by 

 

- logging into Portal

- Going to the profile option in top right hand corner and

- disabling 'email subscriptions' as shown below

 

 

When complete, no email notifications will be received via the WSS Portal communication channel.

Additional Information

With two separate communication channels for WSS maintenance information, there will always be duplication. The status page approach, allowing more granular alerts, is the ideal channel to use but has a smaller number of WSS administrators registered. We strongly recommend that all WSS administrators register to get updates from this channel. When we see that all WSS admins are registered in both locations, it will make it easier to remove notification updates through the Portal, providing one consistent channel for all.