Managing IT Ops Alerts with Custom Alert Fields

Creating Custom Alert Fields

You can create custom alert fields that appear on the Alerts Console as column headings, allowing you to add useful information categories to your alerts. You can create 20 custom fields, and 10 of those custom fields may be indexed. Queries on indexed custom fields run faster. Indexed custom fields have a maximum length of 254 characters. You may change an existing custom field from indexed to non-indexed and vice versa without losing the data it currently has.

Importing Incident Fields as Custom Alert Fields

You can map incident fields into RightITnow as custom alert fields, allowing you to present information from your third-party incident system on the single pane of glass Alerts Console. The only fields that can be imported from incident systems are the ones that can only take values from a list. Free text fields cannot be imported. The created custom fields share the same name as the field in the incident system and are of type List. If the field is dependent from another field in the incident system, both fields are imported and the relationship is preserved. Should the values from the custom list fields you have already imported change in the external system, you can refresh the values within RightITnow ECM by clicking Refresh imported fields.

Custom Alert Field Update Behavior

When updating an alert’s custom alert list field that has dependent custom fields, ECM clears dependent custom field values. If an action that updates a custom field with value “A” is fired against an alert that has already value “A” on that custom field, then the alert and database will not be updated and no workflow action executed. When deleting a custom field, ECM will prompt you whether it should clear the existing values of that custom field in the database.

Executing Actions Upon Custom Field Update

You can configure the workflow engine to execute an action or an action group after a custom field has been updated. This can be very helpful for automating tasks depending upon how custom field values change. For example, if the value “cost center” custom field updates from “United States” to “UK,” then you could trigger an email to your Accounting department apprising them of the change in cost center.