SolarWinds Platform (previously Orion) alerts

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Introduction

SolarWinds Service Desk (SWSD) offers many capabilities to help streamline processes. Integration with SolarWinds Platform allows automatic mapping of SolarWinds Platform nodes, which combines two features that offer insight:

• Your SWSD Change Management Database (CMDB) provides an organized list of assets used throughout your organization.

• Alerts that arise in SolarWinds Platform are automatically converted into Incidents in SWSD.

By integrating SolarWinds Platform and SWSD, you allow these two features to work together and increase your control for better tracking of your ITSM objects.

SWSD also supports alerts from the Hybrid Cloud Observability (HCO) AlertStack feature. AlertStack correlates alerts, events, and other problems on monitored entities, and visualizes them to identify the root cause of issues and resolve them. See SolarWinds Platform AlertStack.

SolarWinds Platform best practices

SolarWinds Platform offers many advantages to streamline efficiency for your IT management. It provides detailed information on IT infrastructure such as networks, servers, applications and databases

SolarWinds recommends implementing automation rules.  For example, analysis of keywords in tickets created via SolarWinds Platform will: 

• Streamline ticket assignment
• Avoid breaches in Service Level Agreements (SLAs)
• Prioritize tickets

Benefits

• Improve efficiency via automatic mapping by:

  • Eliminating the time spent on manual work.
  • Reducing errors that occur when making the connections manually.

• Gain a higher ITIL® maturity process by connecting each node with the relevant incident.

• Enhance service management by aligning SolarWinds Platform assets and dependencies with IT service.

• Enhance change management while improving impact and risk analysis with visibility to resolve SolarWinds Platform issues by attaching SolarWinds Platform configuration and dependency data.

Integrate SolarWinds Platform with SWSD

The integration between SolarWinds Platform and SWSD is composed of two tasks. Each task is mutually exclusive of the other. Although they can co-exist without one other, using both together helps achieve their full value.

Task One: Integrate SolarWinds Platform with Discovery

The SolarWinds Platform Discovery tool aligns SolarWinds Platform assets data with ITSM by auto-populating SolarWinds Platform nodes to the SWSD Change Management Database (CMDB) as network devices.

If SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM) is used, the dependencies between the nodes are also populated and graphically visualized in SWSD (relevant for Service Desk Premier package customers only). See SolarWinds Platform dependency mapping for more information.

Task Two: Integrate SWSD with SolarWinds Platform

SolarWinds Platform alerts that meet specific conditions can automatically create SWSD Incidents.

SWSD can receive an Incident record from any alert SolarWinds Platform can issue.

You can link to multiple SolarWinds Platform environments for alerts.

See Configure SolarWinds Service Desk to be integrated to the SolarWinds Platform for instructions on integrating.

SolarWinds Platform dependency mapping

Dependency mapping allows you to:

• Align SolarWinds Platform asset and dependency data with IT service management processes.

• Auto-populate configuration data from SolarWinds Platform into the CMDB.

• Accelerate root cause analysis by attaching SolarWinds Platform configuration and dependency data to incidents and problems.

Use cases for Dependency Mapping

• Configuration Management

  • Auto populate the CMDB.

  • Ensure the CMDB is maintained and up-to-date.

• Change Management

  • Improve change planning by understanding the impact and risks of potential changes.

• Troubleshooting

  • Quickly analyze and diagnose root causes of SolarWinds Platform issues.

  • Investigate and rapidly resolve SolarWinds Platform issues.

Automatic mapping

SWSD supports the automatic mapping of the relevant Configuration Item (CI) to an Incident record created from a SolarWinds Platform alert. For example, if Node 348 goes down, and Node 348 is listed in SWSD as a CI, SolarWinds Platform will generate an alert and automatically attach the Node 348 CI to the Incident during its creation.

Set up automatic mapping for SolarWinds Platform alerts

1. In SWSD, go to Setup > Integrations > Orion Alerts.

2. Select the desired SolarWinds Platform instance, and next to Automatically attach the SolarWinds Platform node to its corresponding asset or configuration item (CI), assuming such is available in SWSD 12:16:55 PM, set the toggle to On.

   

   If you do not wish to enable this function, click the toggle to Off.
3. Determine whether you are currently using SolarWinds Platform Discovery.
• If no, manually enter the node IDs to the corresponding Node ID fields. Make sure you accurately copy and paste these numbers from SolarWinds Platform.
• If yes, CIs pulled from SolarWinds Platform Discovery (usually from a type of Network device) automatically have the Node ID field populated.
4. In SolarWinds Platform, go to Alerts & Activity > Manage Alerts.
5. For each alert that has an action to Create SWSD incident, go to the alert definition and add to the Entity attributes the Node ID variable.
   
   
6. Follow the steps below to ensure correct configuration on the SolarWinds Platform.
   1. Log into SolarWinds Platform.
   2. Navigate to the Alerts & Activity tab.
   3. Select Alerts.
   4. Mark the relevant alert and select the Edit Alert Definition.
   5. Select the Trigger Action.
   • If you already possess an SWSD incident, select Entity Attributes and mark Node ID.
     
     
   • If you do not possess an SWSD incident, select Add Action, Mark the Create SolarWinds Service Desk and click Configure Action.
   6. Select Entity Attributes and mark Node ID.

Going forward, any incident from SolarWinds Platform with an existing node ID in the CMDB will automatically be attached to the incident. (The node ID displays on the Related tab.)

Related topics

SolarWinds Platform