IT operations are the most efficient when their respective IT teams are less stressed. However, that’s a tough ask considering the amount of work needed to collaborate across multiple tools, correlate events, and update IT infrastructures.
Let’s consider a familiar example
Say you’re monitoring a midsize network with 100 devices. Some users raise tickets in the ITSM platform about poor network connectivity. The service desk technician analyzes the parameters in the tickets and assigns them to the right team of network technicians.
The technicians refer to the network monitoring tool to analyze previous data, device dependencies, and traffic patterns. After a few hours, they track down the outage to a broken BGP push to a router in the area. They contact the team handling network configuration backups over the group chat in the collaboration tool. This team reverts to a stable configuration, finally restoring normal network connectivity.
This particular operation involved one faulty configuration, two teams, and three tools. The impact was hours of downtime and a disruption to productivity—pretty far from efficient.
A platform that integrates with various IT tools can solve this conundrum in one fell swoop. Each tool in such a platform is specialized to work on one aspect of the problem. When there’s a seamless medium for collaboration between tools, the entire workflow is simplified.
How would OpManager handle this scenario?
If OpManager and its integrations were involved in the previous scenario, it would play out like this: OpManager detects the router outage before the users notice. With its robust integrations, OpManager raises a ticket in the help desk tool and alerts the group chat.
By the time the users raise tickets in the ITSM tool, the technicians are already referring to the configuration backups in OpManager’s Network Configuration Manager add-on and reverting to a stable backup. Like clockwork, the issue was detected, alerted about, and resolved.
OpManager offers several off-the-shelf integrations with solutions like ServiceDesk Plus, ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, Freshworks, Slack, and Microsoft Teams. Off-the-shelf integrations are simple and easy to configure but don’t extend to a lot of tools and can’t be adapted for every requirement. That’s where custom integrations come in.
Completely customizable: Build integrations that fit like a glove
As much as we’d like it, it’s impossible to create an integration that’s perfect for every application. That’s why we’ve left the customization part to you.
OpManager’s custom integrations work based on API URLs and webhooks. When OpManager generates an alert or performs an alert action, you can sync that alert to your third-party tool and use it as a trigger to perform an action you define in your ITSM, ITIL®, or collaborative chat tools.
Where would custom integrations come in handy?
Let’s say your organization uses an alert management platform that lets upper-level management get an overview of the incidents that occur on a daily basis. For compliance and data protection purposes, you’re using a tool custom-made for this. A lack of integrations with commercial network monitoring solutions means that you have to sync alerts manually and use spreadsheets or CSV files. That’s a lot of work for something that can be solved easily.
With OpManager, you can get an API for your custom alert management tool and craft a custom integration that fits your requirements. You can customize which alerts are synced, which parameters are included, and what each alert action does in your custom tool. This goes both ways; data from your custom tool can be imported back into OpManager and added to alert notes using custom scripts.
The whole process takes a few minutes and leaves you with a completely customized, seamless link between OpManager and your custom tool. With this, you can create integrations between OpManager and any third-party tool.
Behind the scenes: How OpManager’s custom integrations work
When you configure a custom integration, each alert action in OpManager triggers an API call or invokes a webhook. You can define what this does in your software or tool in OpManager’s UI. This is completely customizable. Once the integration is set up, you’ve got an automatic, seamless data link.
In OpManager’s UI, you’ve got three customization templates: incident management, event management, and chat.
- Incident and event management templates allow you to customize API calls to export specified alert data to raise incident and event tickets, import data from tools back into OpManager using custom scripts, close existing incident and event tickets, and reopen them if they satisfy certain criteria.
- Chat templates invoke webhooks to post alert information in chat tools. You can customize notifications by configuring which parameters to include in them and which groups to notify in the UI itself.
The gist is that OpManager generates alerts, and you can define what these alerts do. In a custom ITSM workflow, you can automate when tickets should be raised, which parameters are raised, how developments and issue resolution are tracked, and which tickets should be reopened. OpManager scans your network and detects potential faults, then you have complete control to create a customized workflow with the IT tools of your choice, provided they support API-based integrations.
You can read further about the more technical aspects of OpManager’s custom integrations from our help documentation on configuring custom integrations.
The why of it: Advantages of custom integrations
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Advanced automation: You can speed up traditional IT workflows by automating collaboration between each tool.
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A flexible platform: APIs allow you to integrate OpManager with any ITSM, ITIL, analytics, collaboration, alert management, or event correlation tool.
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Easy event correlation: When each IT team can access data and insights from all other teams, event correlation is simplified.
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Better visibility: Integrating OpManager with the chat or collaboration platform of your choice provides better visibility of and accountability for the activities of each team. When something goes wrong with critical infrastructure, everyone involved is made aware of it.
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Easier compliance with SLAs: Integrations save valuable time and effort and help IT teams comply with SLAs.
Create your niche custom integrations with OpManager
OpManager’s custom integration support allows you to simplify IT workflows and eliminate the complexities of juggling multiple tools. You can get a hands-on experience of how custom integrations work with a free, 30-day trial, or you can request a free, personalized demo.
