2 Introduction to the Connector

The Oracle Management Connector for BMC Remedy Service Desk 7 integrates BMC Remedy Service Desk v7 with Enterprise Manager through either an HTTP or HTTPS connection. Using this connector, you can create, update, close, or reopen a ticket based on the following types of alerts in Enterprise Manager. The connector also supports job availability events (that is, job failed and job suspended).

Metric alerts
Availability alerts (includes alerts for Up, Down, Blackout Started, Blackout Ended, Agent Unreachable, and Agent Unreachable Resolved)

Note that the term ticket refers to a Remedy incident.

The following sections explain various Remedy Service Desk Connector concepts that you must understand before you start using the Remedy Service Desk Connector.

Auto Ticketing
Manual Ticketing
Ticket Templates
Grace Period

Auto Ticketing

Whenever an alert is triggered or changes in state in Enterprise Manager, the Remedy Service Desk Connector can automatically open or update a ticket. You can specify the set of alerts for which tickets must be opened and the alert severity for which this should happen.

You can do this in Notification Rules, the user-defined rules that define the criteria by which notifications should be sent for alerts.

See Also:

"Configuring Notifications" in the Oracle Enterprise Manager Advanced Configuration Guide

After the ticket is opened, any subsequent update of the alert, such as a change in alert severity, updates the ticket. After the alert is cleared (severity is set to Clear), you can optionally close the ticket.

See Also:

Section 4.1, "Automatically Creating a Ticket"

For Job alerts, this release of the connector for BMC Remedy Service Desk 7 supports creating, updating, or closing tickets for Jobs executed by Oracle Enterprise Manager. Tickets are created/updated and closed, for jobs with various Status changes like Error, Failed, Suspended, Succeeded.

Manual Ticketing

From the Enterprise Manager console, you can manually open a Remedy ticket based on an open alert in Enterprise Manager. The Remedy Service Desk Connector populates the ticket with details based on the alert and the ticket template selected.

See Also:

Section 4.2, "Manually Creating a Ticket"

Ticket Templates

Ticket templates are XML transformation style sheets that transform Enterprise Manager alerts to a ticket format before the requests are sent to Remedy Service Desk. A ticket template specifies how Enterprise Manager alert attributes can populate the fields of a Remedy ticket.

In Auto Ticketing, a notification method is created for each registered ticket template. The selected notification method determines which ticket template is used when a notification is sent out to the Connector. In the case of manual ticketing, you have to select a ticket template before submitting a request to create the ticket.

The Remedy Service Desk Connector includes some out-of-box default ticket templates. You may want to customize the templates to suit your needs.

See Also:

Chapter 5, "Using Default Templates"

Grace Period

The grace period provides you with a configuration to prevent the creation of a large number of tickets for frequently reoccurring alerts. For alerts that occur frequently within a relatively short time interval, it is often desirable to open and maintain a ticket that tracks each occurrence of the alert instead of separate tickets each time.

For recurring alerts, the grace period is a time period during which reoccurrences of the same alert update (or re-open) an existing ticket for the alert, rather than create a new ticket.

For example, an alert triggers and a ticket is opened for it. If the grace period is one hour and the alert is cleared at 10:00 a.m., and if the same alert retriggers before 11:00 a.m. (one-hour grace period), the original ticket will be updated/reopened.

Note:

In Remedy, after a ticket is set to a Closed status, it cannot be reopened. Consequently, an alert that re-triggers within the grace period cannot reopen the ticket but only annotate it. If you want to reopen a ticket for alert occurrences that fall within the grace period, set the ticket status to Resolved instead of Closed when the alert clears. This enables the Remedy Service Desk Connector to reopen the ticket if the same alert reoccurs within the grace period.

Versions Supported

The base Enterprise Manager version number for the BMC Remedy Service Desk 7 Connector Release 1.1.5.0.0 is Enterprise Manager 10g Release 5.