EM7 Tips: 3rd Party Integration and Business Views

Using Inbound Email Event Creation and Virtual Devices to Integrate EM7 with Existing Management Tools

Here’s a great integration story from an EM7 customer.

The Inbound Email Event Creation feature was initially created as an integration tool for Microsoft Operations Manager. One of our customers shared how they extended that integration to a variety of products and custom monitoring solutions making EM7 their “Manager of Managers” and getting more value out of and control over the IT management products they already have in place – from Sybase Performance Center and CA Autosys to MSCS Cluster and internally-developed applications.

Prior to using EM7, this customer had hundreds of homegrown scripts kicking off email notifications for the separate IT technologies they deployed. EM7 functionality replaced a large percentage of those scripts, and the company has since modified many of their existing management tools and scripts to email the EM7 system. Placing a pre-defined device identifier within each message that is sent lets EM7 know what device log each alert should be associated with – for both physical and “virtual” devices (see below).

How to Set-up Inbound Email Event Creation
STEPS WITHIN EM7
1) Define the Mail Domain that EM7 will process email for
2) System Settings for Inbound Email Event Creation:
a) Set up the user email addresses that are allowed to email into EM7
b) Define the location and format (RegEx Type and Pattern) for including the device identifier in the incoming message
3) Create appropriate Event Definitions and Notification Policies

STEPS FOR CUSTOMER MAIL ADMINISTRATOR
1) Set up MX Record to be able to send email into your EM7 system

STEPS IN 3RD PARTY PRODUCTS/MANAGEMENT TOOLS
1) Set up management tools or create customer scripts to email alerts to the inbound address on each customer’s EM7 appliance
2) Place device identifier in email message according to the location/format defined in EM7 System Settings

Using Inbound Email with Virtual Devices for Customized Business Views
3rd-party alerts can be associated with actual devices or with a Virtual Device that can be set up to represent things like a customer, business application/process, etc. In the case of our featured customer, they used Inbound Email Event Creation to associate events with a customized Virtual Device they had set up for database applications – creating a centralized monitoring console for their DBAs.

The Results:
Used in this way, their EM7 solution has helped them to:
- centralize monitoring and management of disparate systems and solutions;
- automatically generate audit trails for event acknowledgement and workflow; and
- provide targeted views to a variety of groups across the organization – based upon function, specialty, location, etc

For more information on Inbound Email Event Creation or Virtual Devices, please check the Knowledgebase or contact us.