PAssist
PAssist is an Android application to assist you while doing on-call duties. The name PAssist is the short form of Pikett-Assist ('Pikett' is the Swiss German term for on-call).
PAssist works for SMS based alerting systems.
App language translations maintained with the great localization platform Lokalise.
Features
PAssist is controlled by your calendar
PAssist activates and deactivates itself based on your calendar. All supervision features are only running, when PAssist is activated. PAssist activates some time (configurable pre-/ post-run time) before and keeps activated some time after the events start and stop time. This ensures you won't miss an alert in case of a small time discrepancy between the operations center time and your phone time. All calendar events matching a configured title pattern are considered as on-call events. PAssist shows you an overview with all future on-call events on the calendar tab.
Alarming
If an SMS is received from your configured operations center, PAssist will race an alert. It is playing a configured ringtone and starts a vibration pattern until you confirm it with a swipe button. When confirmed, an acknowledgement is send back to your operations center. The alarm goes into the confirmed alarm state and can be finally closed when all your support activities are completed.
Alarm log
PAssist creates an alarm log with the start and end time of each incident. All SMS messages received between start and end time are attached to the alarm in the log. On the alert log tab you see all your passed alerts in an overview. Selecting an entry shows the details of an alert incident including current state, reaction time to confirm, duration from start to end and all received SMS messages. The alert log can be exported/imported from/to the external file system.
Phone signal strength
PAssist will supervise the phone signal strength and notifies you with a vibration pattern if the signal strength is bad or off (includes airplane mode). This ensures that you won't stay in a dead spot without recognize it during on-call duties.
Battery level
PAssist will supervise the battery level and notifies if it is below a configured minimum level.
Ringtone volume
PAssist can control the ringtone volume during on-call duty with separate profiles for day and night.
Test alarms
If the SMS alarming system in use sends daily test alarms to verify the alarming chain from end to end, PAssist can be configured to automatically receive and acknowledge them, without interrupting the user. On a configured daily check time, PAssist verifies if the expected test alarms have been received. If not, PAssist will race an alert with a configured ringtone and starts a vibration pattern until you confirm the missing test alarm with a swipe button. Test alarms can be configured for different contexts, as your alarming system may send a test alarms for various systems that are under supervision.
Installation
App-Stores
PAssist can be installed from Google Play or IzzyOnDroid.
Self build
Build PAssist on your own and then install the APK via ADB to your android phone.
SMS permissions
In order to perform the functions of PAssist, PAssist needs to be able to receive and send SMS. As these SMS permissions are no more granted by Google, a compatible SMS adapter is required.
Currently the only supported SMS adapter is secure-sms-proxy. PAssist will guide you to install this SMS adapter.
Configuration
Main settings
Operations center
Defines the contact of your operations center sending alarms via SMS. The SMS received from any phone number of this contact are supervised by PAssist.
PAssist also supports operations centers using numeric and alphanumeric short code SMS numbers. Numeric short codes are currently only supported for the following countries:
- Belgium (BE)
- Botswana (BW)
- Brazil (BR)
- Canada (CA)
- Chile (CL)
- Denmark (DK)
- Dominican Republic (DO)
- Finland (FI)
- France (FR)
- Germany (DE)
- Greece (GR)
- Hungary (HU)
- India (IN)
- Indonesia (ID)
- Ireland (IE)
- Italy (IT)
- Morocco (MA)
- Nepal (NP)
- Netherlands (NL)
- New Zealand (NZ)
- Nigeria (NG)
- Norway (NO)
- Panama (PA)
- Singapore (SG)
- Spain (ES)
- Sweden (SE)
- Switzerland (CH)
- Turkey (TR)
- USA (US)
- United Kingdom (GB)
Alphanumeric short codes are supported in any country.
Numeric short codes can be defined as normal phone numbers in the operations centers contact. Ensure that no separator characters (like '-') are used.
As contacts in Android cannot contain alphanumeric short code phone numbers, they can be configured in the contact field "Company". If the operations centers uses several alphanumeric short code phone numbers, they can be comma separated in the contacts "Company" field. Any regular phone numbers stored in the contacts field "Company" will be ignored.
Be aware that confirmation replies are not possible if alphanumeric short code SMS numbers are used.
Acknowledgement method
Method how to acknowledge alerts received from the operations center.
| Method | Reply channel | Details |
|---|---|---|
| Disabled | - | no reply |
| SMS with static text | SMS | SMS reply with a static text |
| SMS with dynamic text | SMS | SMS reply with a dynamic text (extracted from the received SMS) |
| Fact24 ENS+ | Internet | Fact24 ENS+ WEB workflow with (fixed reply: "CONFIRMED within 5 minutes" |
Confirmation reply (for method: SMS with static text)
Defines the static text to send back as the confirmation reply to your operations center.
Confirmation reply extraction pattern (for method: SMS with dynamic text)
Regular expression pattern with one group to extract a confirmation value from
the received SMS
that will be used as the confirmation reply and sent back to your operations center.
WARNING: If the pattern can not extracted a value from the received SMS, no acknowledgment is send
back to your operations center!
Auto confirm
New alerts are automatically confirmed if received within the defined time window after the last alarm was received, while the app is still in a confirmed alert state. This feature ensures you can stay focused on your current case even with recurring alerts. If set to 0 (default), alarms are never auto confirmed.
SMS ignore filter
Regular expression pattern to identify SMS messages
to be ignored.
If empty, SMS filtering is disabled.
WARNING: Be careful, if the pattern is not well designed and triggers for a real alarm, you won't be alerted!
Alarm ringtone
Defines the ringtone that is used to alert for on-call alarms.
Calendar filter
Defines one specific or all of your calenders, that should be used to look for on-call events.
Event filter
Defines a Regular expression pattern (case insensitive) to match the titles of your calendar events, which should be considered for your on-call duties.
Extract partner contacts from events
Defines whether partner contacts are extracted from on-call duty events.
Extraction pattern for partner contacts
Defines a Regular expression pattern to
extract partner contacts from on-call duty events.
The partner contacts are extracted from the notes field of on-call duty events.
There can be several partner contacts in the event notes.
The extracted partner contacts are interpreted as contact nicknames.
Pre- /post-run time
Time in seconds to enable/disable the on-call state before and after the calender event. The default is 300 seconds (five minutes).
Supervise signal strength
Defines whether the signal strength is supervised or not. In case the battery level falls below 10% the check interval is reduced in favour of a longer remaining term.
Minimal signal strength
Defines the lowest accepted signal strength level.
Signal filter
Defines the amount of seconds for which the signal strength must be lower than the minimal expected level before a low signal alarm is raced. With filtering you can reduce false alarms. The filter can be set between 0 (filtering off) and 10 minutes, with a default of 30 seconds. Be aware: With higher values, it takes longer until you are notified of a dead spot. Even with filtering enabled, the airplane mode is detected immediately.
Alert with notification
Defines whether an alert for low signal strength creates a notification or not. The phone also shows a low signal strength through a vibration pattern, regardless of this setting.
Supervised subscription (for Dual SIM only)
For dual SIM phones you can select the subscription for which the signal strength is supervised.
Supervise battery level
Defines whether the battery level is supervised or not.
Minimal battery level
Defines the minimal battery level in percentage (between 10% - 50%). If the current battery level falls below this minimal level, a alert notification is created. Independent of the this minimal battery level, whenever the battery level is in the danger zone (below 10%) the polling interval for PAssist checks (e.g. signal strength) is lowered to minimize the power consumption.
Test alarm settings
Use test alarms
Enable or disable the test alarm feature.
Test alarm message pattern
Regular expression pattern to identify SMS alarm messages as test alarms (case
sensitive).
WARNING: Be careful, if the pattern is not well designed and triggers for a real alarm, you won't be alerted!
The regular expression can define a group to extract the test context (for example the name of the system) out of the SMS. As an example the following regular expression could handle test alarms from two different systems 'Helios' and 'Lunar':
^Test alarm for system (Helios|Lunar).*
Test alarms of each group can be supervised individually.
Test contexts to supervise
Defines which of the available test contexts should be supervised.
Check time
Defines the daily time on which the check occurs whether the test alarms have been received recently or not.
Test alarm time window
Defines the time window in which the test alarm must have been received before the check time to be accepted.
Check days
Defines the weekdays on which the test alarms are checked.
Missing test alarm ringtone
Defines the ringtone that is used to alert for missing test alarms.
Day/night profile settings
Profile start times
Time when day/night profile starts.
Ringtone volume
Defines whether PAssist should control the ringtone volume during on-call duty or not. The desired ringtone volumes can be defined for the day and night profile separably. If activated, the ringtone volume is automatically restored to the former value, when on-call duty is finished.
Battery drain
Enable "Minimize at night" to reduce power drain at night by reducing the check interval for the signal strength monitoring.
Supported languages
Currently, the following languages are supported in PAssist:
- English
- German
- French
- Italian
Translation support for any additional language is warmly welcome - just get in contact with me. PAssist is using Lokalise to maintain language translations.
Open-Source and free
PAssist is Open-Source and available under Apache-2.0 licence. If you find PAssist useful and use it on a regular basis for your on-call duties, a voluntary donation is warmly welcome.
Disclaimer
The use of PAssist is at your own risk. The author assumes no liability for malfunctions of the application. Any warranty claims are excluded.
Development
PAssist is developed with Android-Studio with Java 17. The current Android target SDK is 35 (Android 15-VanillaIceCream) and the minimal SDK is 26 (Android 8.0-Oreo).
Used libraries
Devices compatibility
Feedback
Feedback, bug reports or feature requests are very welcome. You can send an email to frimtec@gmx.ch or open an issue on GitHub.