A common requirement for any monitoring solution is to integrate with a service desk ticketing system.
Most will accept an email or API call to create tickets if the monitoring solution detects an issue.
I recently worked with a customer who needed their emails to their service desk to have specific tags on the email subject line, to ensure the tickets were raised for the correct DBAs (Oracle or SQL Server) and at the right severity level, P1 to P4.
Previously we may have mapped Foglight’s warning, critical, fatal severity levels to the P level. However, it may become more complex than that. For my customer the alarm itself was more important, and so particular alarms would always be a P1 and others always a P4.
Another aspect was dealing with enabling alarms to be raised, but no tickets raised, as they weren’t incidents but maybe of value to a DBA if time allows them to investigate.
Recent versions of Foglight have the template alarm management system as well as notification channels, so I was very happy to offer this approach to the customer.
We could create alarm templates and thresholds for their Oracle or SQL server environments, and also have templates for Prod and Non-Prod systems. The key point here is we didn’t have to build templates with a view on how they would map them to the incident ticketing system, that could come later.
In my example above I have my SQL Server Prod env template. We can see all the host alarms and thresholds.
And here are the alarms for the SQL instance. 4 hosts and 4 instances are assigned. Assume I have already decided which alarms I want and what thresholds.
I have also set up my notification channels.
I’ve created 5 channels. Three relating to P1, P2 and P4. Some alarms might be relevant to the DBAs directly, such as baseline deviation alerts, without creating a ticket. And finally a generic one as a catch all.
What I’ve done is put the relevant text in the subject line of the email so that it gets into the correct queue.
Next step is we can review all the alarms that we want as P1
In my example I’ve filtered with ‘backup’ and selected the alarms and the relevant severities we want as P1, so a mixture of fatal, critical and warning. I’m really pleased with this approach as we can include all severity levels, such as warning, but just for the alarms that are relevant to.
And for P2 we might want to avoid Fatal alerts which is covered by some other system but would be important (but not for a call out) to the DBA
Hopefully you get the idea. And for the DBAs, email alerts on baselines only.
This is so flexible. You could also group the types of alarms, for example I could have two P2 notification channels, one for infrastructure and one for database only, this gives me the option of putting alternative text in the subject email, such as P2 Inf, and P2 DBA, for relevant routing to the right team.
Try this for yourself, we have an interactive demo site or trial a POC of the SaaS or on-prem version of Foglight https://www.quest.com/products/foglight-for-cross-platform-databases/
