vRealize Network Insight is a must-have tool for any modern IT infrastructure. vRNI is a data powerhouse and has all information about the configured environment. There are a ton of different health checks that vRNI validates against the infrastructure configuration, which generates alerts. You can also define custom alerts based on traffic patterns, application performance degradation, and more.
In an enterprise IT infrastructure, usually, a team of people manages the environment; during an issue, it may be possible that more than one person is working on it. To address this situation, organizations have their internal ticketing system to handle an incident. It may not be feasible for everyone to check the vRNI UI for events; you can choose to receive email or SMTP notifications for critical events/alerts. You can take the next step by integrating with any ticketing tool that accepts SMTP/SNMP notifications.
In this blog post, we will look at how to integrate with ServiceNow for generating Incidents.
Requirements
- vRNI user with admin access
- ServiceNow user with access to create/modify incidents and inbound actions
Steps Overview
- Find the ServiceNow system email address
- Identify the critical events/alerts from vRNI to generate tickets and configure them to send an email alert to the email address obtained from Step 1.
- In ServiceNow, create an inbound action to generate tickets from the vRNI email address
Detailed Instructions
Finding the ServiceNow system email address:
For a ServiceNow Cloud instance, the system email address is [email protected].
To find the email address, log into ServiceNow and go to System Mailboxes → Administration → Email Accounts → ServiceNow SMTP
Identify the Alerts and Enable Notifications
Login to vRNI, navigate to Settings → Alerts and Notification → Alerts. Edit the event you want to get notified about, enable notification, choose Email Frequency as immediate, and input the ServiceNow system email address.
Create the Inbound Action to Create an Incident
Log in to ServiceNow → System Policy → Email → Inbound Actions → New
Provide a unique name in the target table, search for the incident and choose Incident, choose Action Type “Record Action.”
Navigate to the Actions tab, and write a script to customize the incident such as look, description, priority, and more.
Here is the link to the sample script
You can further customize the incoming event by authoring your own script. Please look at ServiceNow documentation for more information.
Conclusion
When vRNI generates an alert, it will send it to the ServiceNow system email. The Inbound Action will create a ticket and executes the script to customize it. To view the incidents Go to Incident → All and open the incident opened by vRNI.
Using the same method, we can integrate vRNI with any ticketing solution that accepts SMTP or SNMP notification.
