Automation Workflow for Intelligent Alert Routing to On-Call Engineers

This workflow automates the critical bottleneck of Level 1 NOC alert triage, where engineers waste hours sifting through redundant alarms to identify the true incident and the correct responder. By integrating with monitoring tools like SolarWinds or Dynatrace, it ingests raw alerts, classifies them using ML models for severity and service impact, and enriches them with topology context and runbook links. The operational upside comes from slashing Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA), preventing alert fatigue, and ensuring the most qualified engineer is engaged first, which directly protects SLAs and reduces operational risk.

Implementation requires integrating the orchestration layer (e.g., LangGraph) with monitoring APIs, on-call management systems like PagerDuty or Opsgenie, and a CMDB for service mapping. Controls are essential: high-severity alerts can require multi-engineer paging, and all routed actions must be logged for audit. Exception routing for ambiguous alerts is handled by a human-in-the-loop queue in ServiceNow. The result is a production-grade system that reduces operator toil while maintaining strict governance over incident response.

This workflow automates the critical bottleneck of manual alert triage in Network Operations Centers (NOCs). By ingesting raw alarms from tools like SolarWinds or Dynatrace, an AI orchestrator classifies each event by severity, impacted service (e.g., core routing, VoIP, SD-WAN), and probable root cause. This immediate contextualization eliminates noise, preventing engineers from being woken for low-priority or unrelated issues, which directly reduces operator toil and accelerates expert engagement for genuine incidents.

Implementation integrates via APIs with on-call management platforms (PagerDuty, Opsgenie) and communication channels (Slack, MS Teams). The orchestrator matches the enriched alert against a dynamic skill matrix and real-time schedule to route the notification. Controls include escalation timers for unacknowledged alerts, manual override capabilities, and full audit logging back to the ITSM (ServiceNow, Jira). This creates a closed-loop system that reduces Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA) and ensures the most qualified engineer is engaged first.

This workflow automates the critical bottleneck of Level 1 NOC alert triage, where engineers waste hours manually sifting through duplicate alarms to identify the correct responder. By integrating with monitoring tools like SolarWinds or Dynatrace, an orchestration layer classifies each alert, enriches it with runbook links and topology context, and determines the optimal on-call engineer based on real-time schedules from PagerDuty and skill matrices. The immediate business value is a 60-80% reduction in mean time to engage (MTTE), directly protecting SLAs and revenue by ensuring the most qualified person is notified first with the data needed to act.

Implementation is phased, starting with integration to a single monitoring source and a basic severity-based routing rule. Phase two adds enrichment from the CMDB and dynamic skill matching, while phase three introduces approval gates for major incident declarations and automated post-mortem report generation. Key controls include human-in-the-loop escalation paths for P1 incidents, audit logs of all routing decisions, and a feedback loop where engineers can flag misclassifications to continuously retrain the underlying models, ensuring the system adapts to network changes.

This workflow automates the critical bottleneck of Level 1 NOC alert triage, where engineers waste hours manually sifting through noisy alarms to find the signal. By implementing AI-driven classification and intelligent routing, you cut mean time to acknowledge (MTTA) by over 70%, directly reducing outage impact and operator burnout. The architecture integrates with monitoring stacks like SolarWinds or Dynatrace, ingests raw SNMP traps and syslog, and applies a classifier agent to tag each alert with severity, probable root cause, and impacted service tier.

Implementation requires building orchestration logic, typically with LangGraph or a custom microservice, to manage the stateful routing flow. You must integrate with on-call management APIs (PagerDuty, Opsgenie) and ITSM systems (ServiceNow) for ticket creation. Critical controls include human-in-the-loop approval gates for critical network changes, real-time dashboards for alert volume, and automated fallback escalation paths to ensure no alert is ever dropped during an engineer's unavailability.