Systems Directorate includes a ticketing system and a method of performing notifications.
Ticketing
A minimal ticketing system is provided so that support teams can track and work on issues. Tickets can be assigned to teams and individuals.
Here are some of the ticket fields available.
- Ticket number
- Status
- Severities from 1 to 4
- Contact name for manual tickets
- Assignment to teams and users within a team
- Company name that the computer belongs to
- Host name of the computer
- Title
- Message updates
- History which includes all state, assignment, and message updates for auditing purposes.
Automation
Ticket automation is provided by the message rule engine. Rules can be configured for individual event types to create tickets to teams. One special rule is provided which can pull ticketing creation information from the CMDB for a computer. Any operator can easily define a team and severity for ticketing based on these three event criteria.
- Monitor name
- Instance name
- Event severity
Notifications
Notifications are used to inform support personnel that an event has occurred or a ticket has been assigned to them.
Notifications are based on application tools that the administrator must setup. One tool can be setup to email a user and others can be setup to send pages. Directorate cannot send pages itself, but can be integrated with paging software. Most carriers do support an email interface to mobile phones on their networks.
Suppression
Notification suppression’s are available to help teams or users stop notifications from being sent to them. Suppressions do not stop the event from happening or the ticket from being created – it only stops the notification.
Suppression can be defined in the following locations.
- On the computer record in the CMDB
- On the support team profile
- On the user’s own profile.
Suppression’s are based on event filters that can defined by:
- Time including start and end dates, start and end times of day, days of week, and days of month.
- Fields in the message data. Any field can be compared to values provided by the administrator or user.
For example, a suppression can be defined to stop all drive space alerts over weekends.