vRealize Operations is a great tool for monitoring your infrastructure and applications. With its included alerting capabilities, you’ll know right away when things go wrong, when you’re running low on capacity, or if you’re out of compliance, just to name a few. Management Packs are a great way to easily expand your alerting capabilities to things like applications, infrastructure, and even services such as VMware Skyline and AWS. And thanks to vRealize Operations unique implementation of symptom-based alert definitions, you can create your own alerts for general issues or specific problems you’ve incurred in the past. Alert notifications can be sent to your e-mail or implemented in many other ways using REST, SNMP traps, or by generating log files. These methods provide a great deal of flexibility; however, customers wanted an easier way to integrate alert notifications with their existing IT workflows. I’m happy to share with you that the latest vRealize Operations 7.5 delivers your number one requested notification plugin for ServiceNow.
Prior to this, most of our customers implemented Email notifications as it was the easiest to employ. However, e-mail does not offer a great method of tracking and can easily get buried. How many of us have created inbox rules for alert notifications? I most certainly have! Native ServiceNow integration in vRealize Operations 7.5 allows users to easily direct alert notifications to their existing ticketing system. This allows for better visibility and tracking without having to invest in any custom development.
vRealize Operations 7.5 plugs into existing IT workflows
If you’re running vRealize Operations 7.5 Advanced or Enterprise, then you’ll have access to the ServiceNow notification plugin. With this plugin, you can configure vRealize Operations to open a new ServiceNow incident when an alert is triggered. 19 customizable fields allow you to include critical information and assign the incident to the proper team or individual. This means that you don’t have to rely on ServiceNow assignment policies as alerts can be assigned directly from vRealize Operations. Additional information such as the impacted business service, severity and priority can also be included. With this integration, incidents can be easily tracked throughout your organization.
Configuring ServiceNow with vRealize Operations
Configuring vRealize Operations 7.5 to connect to your ServiceNow instance is dead simple. All we need is the URL you use to log into ServiceNow and a set of credentials. The service account that you use here requires the ITIL role within ServiceNow.
Once you’ve configured the outbound ServiceNow instance, it’s just a matter of creating notification rules just like you would with e-mail or other notifications. Simply select the Service-Now Notification Plugin method as well as the instance you just configured.
Once you change the notification method to ServiceNow, you’ll see the 19 customizable fields appear. These fields map directly back to ServiceNow. In the example above, I have created a caller in ServiceNow called “vRealize Operations” as well as a Category for “Virtual Machine.” These fields will appear in any new incidents and allow for better visibility and reporting. A short description is also included to show the alert name and ID.
Additional information can be seen below including the impacted object as well as a URL which will take you directly to the alert in vRealize Operations
This process also works in reverse so when you cancel an alert in vRealize Operations the Service Now incident will also be canceled. All we have to do is create a new alert notification rule in vRealize Operations. In this rule, we’ll filter for alerts where the status is canceled and change the state of the Service Now Incident.
If you’re not sure what state to use, we can find out easily in Service Now. Just open an incident and click on the state field and show choice list.
In this case, we’ll use a value of 8 as this will set the incident state to canceled.
Conclusion
Native ServiceNow integration is a welcome addition to an already long list of new features in vRealize Operations 7.5. This allows IT organizations to better integrate vRealize Operations into their daily workflows by automatically generating ServiceNow incidents from vRealize Operations alerts. With the addition of management packs and customizable alerts, vRealize Operations can call out issues across your physical, virtual, and public cloud environments. For more information or to take vRealize Operations for a free 60-day test drive, check out the vRealize Operations product page and take a look at the videos and demos at vrealize.vmware.com.
