AlertOps and ManageEngine SDP

AlertOps’ alert management system can be integrated with ManageEngine to receive and respond to all (predefined status mappings) alerts through email, SMS, push notification or phone alerts. AlertOps would ensure that the alert/job status would reach the appropriate team by using proper workflows, escalation policies and schedules. Based on your ruleset, incidents can be automatically opened and closed, depending on how the status changes in ManageEngine for a service request.

The above scenario and scope for integration is due to the fact that AlertOps has a very flexible and simple API/Webhook configuration feature that can be leveraged with ManageEngine SDP's trigger events.

AlertOps - Inbound Integration

We can define some rulesets in AlertOps so that ManageEngine can send out events to the AlertOps platform. AlertOps would ensure based on these notifications received, that it would always reach out and assign to the correct person/team by utilizing its escalation policies, schedules, and workflow features.

AlertOps provides Inbound Integrations to integrate with numerous monitoring, chat and ITSM tools. You can configure an inbound integration for ManageEngine Service Desk Plus alerts. 

At a high level this is how the flow looks like, you define an API integration in the AlertOps platform by defining settings like Integration Name, Escalation rules, recipient users/groups. Once an integration is defined, a unique API URL is generated. This acts as webhook or the gateway through which notifications from ManageEngine reach AlertOps and thus an incident/alert is created correspondingly. The API can be defined with various settings like URL mappings, filters, escalations etc. as required. ManageEngine has to be defined with a webhook and trigger.

Configure Inbound Integration in AlertOps

1. Navigate to Configuration àIntegrations àAdd API Integration à API Integration Detail page.
2. Select ManageEngine SDP
3. Once you select the integration, you can then specify basic settings like the integration name, escalation policy, names of the recipients/groups for which the alerts must be assigned to.
4. Once you click save, the API Integration will be created, and you will be given a unique URL which acts as the access point and needs to be configured at the source (in this case ManageEngine), to send events. You can find the integration you just created, and you can give advanced settings and define various configurations for the alerts to be received and processed. For example, you can define when to open and close alerts based on the payload obtained from the API call, filters etc.
5. Make a note of the API URL, which will be used in ManageEngine SDP, so it calls a HTTP POST request to this URL with the body in JSON format containing the alert specific information. AlertOps automatically creates an alert when the status variable (status^name) contains 'Open'. The incident will also be closed automatically when the status 'Closed/Resolved' is received from SDP.
6. You can similarly define Rules for Opening and Closing Alerts as you want in Advanced settings, owing to the flexibility provided by AlertOps’ OpenAPI/Plug-and-Play integrations. You can provide other filters and match with regex expressions as well. You can also test the generated URL with the sample data provided.

Configure Integration in ManageEngine SDP 

1. In your SDP cloud portal, select the Setup Gear icon in the top right corner
2. Type in 'Webhooks' in the search area, or alternatively you can navigate to Automation > Custom Actions
3. Select 'New Webhook'
4. Give the webhook a name, paste the AlertOps Inbound Integration API URL in the URL field.
5. Select Applies to as "Requests". (this can be anything, but mapping conditions should customized in the AlertOps Inbound Integration template)
6. Select Method as 'POST'
7. Select Type as 'JSON' under message body and paste the following.

{
  "id":"${id}",
  "requester":"${requester}",
  "category":"${category}",
  "subcategory":"${subcategory}",
  "technician":"${technician}",
  "subject":"${subject}",
  "priority":"${priority}",
  "mode":"${mode}",
  "urgency":"${urgency}",
  "status":"${status}",
  "is_escalated":"${is_escalated}",
  "notification_status":"${notification_status}",
  "resolved_time":"${resolved_time}",
  "requester_ack_comments":"${requester_ack_comments}",
  "request_type":"${request_type}",
  "responded_time":"${responded_time}",
  "requester_ack_resolution":"${requester_ack_resolution}",
  "created_time":"${created_time}",
  "created_by":"${created_by}",
  "completed_time":"${completed_time}",
  "approval_status":"${approval_status}",
  "scheduled_time":"${scheduled_time}",
  "service_category":"${service_category}",
  "site":"${site}",
  "deleted_time":"${deleted_time}",
  "display_id":"${display_id}",
  "due_by_time":"${due_by_time}",
  "first_response_due_by_time":"${first_response_due_by_time}",
  "group":"${group}",
  "has_notes":"${has_notes}",
  "department":"${department}",
  "description":"${description}"
}

 8. You can Save and Test the webhook with sample triggers. Save!

9. Now under Setup > Automation > select 'Triggers'. You need to define triggers to call these webhooks. Select 'New Trigger'

9. Define the trigger for opening alerts as per the below screenshot, under actions make sure you select 'Webhooks'

10. Save. Create another trigger with the webhook action, for closing alerts as per the below screenshot and save. 

11. Now when you navigate back to you Webhooks section, you should have 2 Triggers configured for your webhook. Make sure it is enabled.

Thats it! You have configured a webhook and trigger for your service requests in ManageEngine SDP. Any alert will be sent to AlertOps for incident management. 

Message logs, alert specific information can be viewed in the “Inbound Log” section in AlertOps Dashboard. Alerts can be viewed in the ‘Alerts’ tab as well.

Alert Triggering Information

AlertOps will automatically create an incident when a new alert is received from ManageEngine SDP when the status_name contains "Open".

If an alert with status "Open"  matches an existing Open Alert, AlertOps will recognize the new alert as a duplicate and ignore the alert.

The alert will be recorded in the Inbound Messages table as “Mapped Appended.”

AlertOps will automatically close the same incident when an alert with status_name contains "Closed/Resolved".

References

AlertOps Integration Guides

General Restful API Guide

Manage Engine SDP Guide