Managing Action Strategies

As you configure and assign actions, you should take several things into consideration.

Assigning an external notification action (email, SMS, beeper) to a large list of devices greatly increases the chance of numerous notifications being sent at one time.
For example, an email action assigned to a router and each of the devices that depend on that router for their Internet connectivity, would send email notifications not only from the router, but also from every single connected device, should the router go down.

In a situation like this, it considers using dependencies allowing you to restrict email notifications to only the router and the critical devices to which it is connected. For more information, see Dependencies overview.
An action can be assigned to a device or to an active or passive monitor.
If you want to be notified if and when any or all of the monitors on a device go down, assign the action to the device. If you are concerned with specific monitors on a device, assign the action to the monitor itself. If you assign to both the device and a specific monitor, both actions fire when the monitor goes down.
Action policies are easier to manage than lists of actions built on a device.
Whenever possible, use action policies in lieu of configuring multiple actions for one device.
If the existing WhatsUp Gold device states do not fit your monitoring needs, you can modify them, or configure new ones.
Consider adding device states for longer periods of downtime, such as creating a Down at least 60 mins state, and sending an escalated message to show that the device is still down after an hour.
Web Alarms are only useful if someone is able to hear the notifications.
While Web Alarms are useful in many situations, they are not the most efficient way to monitor devices and services overnight.
Visual notifications are usually ample enough for most of the devices on your network.
Unless the device is vital to the daily-operation of your network or business, the color and shape of each device state easily informs you of current network device status.
You can check on the status of firing alerts via Running Actions. From here, you can cancel single alerts, or all currently firing alerts.