Achieving Two-Way Integration Between an IT Ops Event Correlation Manager and Incident Systems

Two-Way Incident System Integration: It All Starts with Connectors

RightITnow ECM provides incident system connectors that allow direct integration and interoperability with ATLASSIAN JIRA, ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus, BMC Service Desk (ARS 7.5), and Salesforce Service Cloud. ECM also provides a connector to the IT Service Management component of Serena’s Serena Business Manager (SBM). The connector creates an incident based on a RightITnow ECM alert and reflects the changes made on the incident to the alert. Additional incident management connectors include ServiceNow^® and Zendesk.

Automatically Creating Incident Tickets Pre-Populated with Alert Info

ECM’s Create Incident action and associated Insert Incident menu item automatically create a third-party incident ticket in an Incident Management system such as ServiceNow^®, and this incident is pre-populated with the alert info from which you inserted the incident. For example, imagine that you are reviewing an alert in ECM’s Alert Console and you spot one for which you would like to create a ServiceNow^® incident ticket. All you need to do is right-click the alert and select the Insert Incident command to create a corresponding incident within ServiceNow^® that contains all relevant alert information from ECM. Similarly, you can use the Update Incident command to update the incident ID attached to an alert with an existing incident ID, and even automatically execute an action after the update. You can choose to append or overwrite the info in the incident system.

Updating ECM Alert Custom Fields with Incident System Info

You can create custom alert fields in ECM that correspond to fields in external incident systems. For example, you could create a custom alert field, incidentStatus that corresponds to the ServiceNow^® incident status field, and then using the Update Alert Custom Field action, you can update the status of the ServiceNow^® incident as displayed in the ECM Alert’s custom field, yielding two-way integration between ECM and the third-party incident system.

Acting On Underlying Alerts Using Incident Creation Workflow Rules

ECM provides sophisticated workflow rules you can use to configure ECM to take action on alerts when creating an incident in a third-party incident management system from within ECM. Incident creation workflow rules include automatically assigning alerts to the logged in user when creating an incident based on the alert, and running an action or actions after creating an incident or updating an alert with an incident. You can also configure the workflow to take specific actions whenever incident value status changes.