1 Introduction to the Connector

Types of Alerts

You can create, update, or close tickets based on only the following types of alerts in Enterprise Manager:

• Metric alerts

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

Auto Ticketing

Whenever an alert is triggered in Enterprise Manager, the HP ServiceCenter Connector can automatically open or update an incident 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.

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

For auto-ticketing, you must specify in the notification rule the ticket template to be used when alerts specified in the ticket occur. A ticket template is displayed as a notification method in the notification rule.

Manual Ticketing

From the Enterprise Manager Grid Control console, you can manually open an incident ticket based on an open alert in Enterprise Manager. The HP ServiceCenter Connector populates the ticket with details based on the alert and the ticket template.

Ticket Templates

Ticket templates are transformation style sheets in XSLT format that transform Enterprise Manager alerts to ticket format before the requests are sent to the ServiceCenter application.

These templates specify how Enterprise Manager alert attributes can populate the fields of a ServiceCenter Incident. A ticket template helps in the mapping of Enterprise Manager Alert fields into ServiceCenter incident fields.

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. For manual ticketing, you have to select a ticket template before submitting a request to create a ticket. The Enterprise Manager installation for the ServiceCenter connector includes some out-of-box ticket templates to facilitate easy usage of this feature, but you can modify and extend templates as needed for your instance of the ServiceCenter connector.

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 one Incident 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 reopen) an existing ticket for the alert instead of opening 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 ticket that had been originally created for the alert is updated/reopened rather than creating a new ticket.

Versions Supported

This connector supports the following version of Enterprise Manager:

• Enterprise Manager Grid Control 10g Release 4 or higher Management Service with one-off patch 6884527 or later.

The base Enterprise Manager version number for the HP ServiceCenter Connector Release 1.0.4.0.0 is Enterprise Manager 10g Release 4.

Prerequisites

Before using the HP ServiceCenter Connector, ensure that you meet the following prerequisites:

• ServiceCenter 6.1 service tier is installed and configured.

• ServiceCenter 6.1 consoles are installed and configured. If the URL connector framework option is selected, the ServiceCenter Web console must be installed and configured. See Section 3.2, "Installing and Configuring the HP ServiceCenter 6.1 Web Console" for instructions.

• Oracle Patches are installed. To install patches, do the following:

  1. Download patch # 6884527 from http://metalink.oracle.com/.

  2. Follow the instructions included with the download in the README.txt file.