Maestro Communication: Worth a Thousand Words

Building effective communication is a keystone for arranging effective and transparent infrastructure management.

The user needs to know a lot: from the status of the specific freshly run instance to global costs trends, security issues, and access requests.

So, building a dialog actually needs several steps to be performed:

• Collecting the necessary data (collecting performance metrics, collecting data from integrated tools, building analytics)
• Establishing communication (deciding on the type of notifications to be sent, and their content)
• Building communication strategy (identifying the most effective way to deliver the content without spamming or overloading the users with the information).

So how does Maestro face this?

Collecting data is more of a technical question, which depends on the abilities of the in-built engines and integrated tools.

Deciding on communication means is the next step which needs us to analyze the scope of the retrieved information, the recipient groups, and their needs.

This is where we come to the following notifications classification:

• Notifications: A message sent by Maestro3 aimed to inform users of infrastructure change or account-related activities (for example, instance state change, schedule failure, login attempt, etc). In addition to information about the event, notifications can also include action items (for example, APPROVE/REJECT buttons for login attempt approval).
• Reports: Automatically aggregated summary of statistics related to virtual infrastructure state, performance, or costs. This can include analysis of past data, predictions, optimization, and improvement suggestions.
• Push notifications: Brief notifications on the most important infrastructure events sent to Maestro mobile application users.
• Teams notifications: The possibility to get the most important notifications and approval letters to your specified Teams channel.

Building a communication strategy is the last, but not the least, step, which can lead either to success or serious failure of the whole process.

Communication strategy

Maestro generates 80+ reports and notifications covering all dimensions of infrastructure creation, management, monitoring and cost control aspects.

To makes sure that the collected information is delivered and perceived properly, we need to:

Group the communication elements by purpose

All communication elements are grouped in Maestro according to their purpose. This allows subscribing/unsubscribing specific users, user groups, or tenant teams not in letter-by-letter mode, but by logical groups, such as lifecycle management, financial analytics, security reports, etc.

Give responsibility

For each tenant, there are key users, called primary and secondary contacts, who can manage the subscriptions on the tenant level.

These users can set up the default communication policy for the whole team, or for specific groups of users, based on their understanding of the team’s skillset, responsibilities, goals, and approaches. They can also allow or deny the possibility for the users to customize these subscription settings – thus regulating the insistency of receiving the information of the specific type by the users.

Allow Customization

Once the tenant management has decided on the overall communication strategy, the users, in case customization, is allowed for them, can modify their subscription in a way that fits their specific needs and workflows.

Moreover, in addition to subscribing/unsubscribing, the users can set up automatic forwarding of their notifications to other trusted users, in case they need to share the responsibilities with them.

Set up a Calendar

However good and useful notifications are, getting them all in one day, will make any recipient feel overloaded and spammed.

For information to be effective, it is necessary to schedule it properly and to balance carefully between the timely delivery of the necessary knowledge and keeping it easy to get and process.

That is where the concept of the Maestro calendar was born. Maestro calendar is the calendar of Maestro events – reports and notifications sent regularly to Maestro users in order to notify them of important events and changes in their infrastructures. For example,

• Expenses Forecast [F] report is sent on the 1st, 8th, 15th, and 22nd day of the month.
• Monthly Expenses ([ME], former All resources costs) report is sent on the 6th day of the month.
• Weekly reports (e.g., weekly Vulnerabilities [wV] report) are sent at the beginning of the week.
• Notifications about unauthorized actions are sent at night on the day when the action was detected, etc.

Understanding when and where different reports and notifications are sent helps managers of tenants and other responsible persons to keep track of important changes and to focus on the relevant information without losing it among other letters.

Sum Up

Maestro has a well-designed, time-tested approach to establishing communication with users. It has a proper selection of notifications and reports content, the possibility to adjust the subscription to the specific needs of a tenant and its users, and a conveniently set up calendar. Altogether, this creates convenient information gathering and delivery processes that ensure the maximum effectiveness of Maestro usage.