Installation and Setup - Alert Sync

Cookdown Alert Sync for ServiceNow is made up of two pieces, a SCOM management pack and a ServiceNow app. They are installed and configured to talk to each other to sync Alerts and raise Incidents.

Pre-Requisites

Before you get stuck in make sure you have the following:

1. A valid Cookdown Alert Sync product license key

2. A ServiceNow service account that SCOM can use to connect to ServiceNow with

3. ServiceNow admin credentials (to install the ServiceNow app with)

4. SCOM admin credentials (to install the SCOM MP with)

Installation

SCOM

There are two management packs to install into SCOM:

• Cookdown ServiceNow Connector

• Cookdown Licensing

Both Management Packs are installed like any other management pack following the standard Microsoft import from disk steps here. After installation, close and re-open the SCOM console.

Note that the Cookdown ServiceNow Connector contains multiple products (Alert Sync and Discovery) and what is available to use depends on what you have a license activated for and that the Licensing Management Pack is shared between all Cookdown products that are licensed in SCOM. This means that if you already have a copy of the Cookdown Licensing and/or Cookdown ServiceNow Connector Management Packs installed you have nothing else to install into SCOM.

ServiceNow

The Cookdown SCOM Connector app is a free download from the ServiceNow App Store. Install it from there. Direct link to Store app.

Configuration

Once installation has been completed you will need to configure both systems as outlined in the following articles:

• ServiceNow Setup
  • Alert Sync Roles
• SCOM Setup

Testing

If all previous stages have been completed you should now be in a position to test Alert Sync. Enable Standard and/or Event Management from the Global connector settings. If you have a subscription set up already Alert Sync will start to forward matching alerts to ServiceNow. If you do not have a subscription set up or have no matching alerts currently you can still forward an alert manually.

Forwarding an Alert Manually

1. From the 'Monitoring' pane in the SCOM console select a view that will show you an alert

   1. 'Active Alerts' for example

2. Select and then right click on an Alert

3. From 'Forward to' select the Alert Sync Connector created earlier

Optionally: Personalize your View

Whilst not necessary, personalizing your view in SCOM to show some extra columns can help provide some insight as to what is happening with your alert forwarding:

1. From the 'Monitoring' pane in the SCOM console select a view that will show you some alerts that you will be testing with

   1. 'Active Alerts' for example

2. From the ‘Tasks' pane to the right, select the ‘Personalize’ action from 'Alert Actions’

3. If not using Bidirectional Sync enable

   1. Connector

   2. Forwarding Status

   3. Last Modified By

4. If using Bidirectional Sync additionally enable

   1. Ticket ID

   2. Owner

   3. Custom fields 1-5

5. Select OK

View Alerts in ServiceNow

Once the sync interval has elapsed you should start to see Alerts appear in ServiceNow. Select ‘Scom Alerts' from the 'Cookdown SCOM Connector’ section:

If you do not see this option you may be missing some user roles or, if you have only just installed the Cookdown ServiceNow App, you may need to logout and back in again.

If you are pushing alerts manually you may find it beneficial to use the cog wheel to enable the 'Created' column which will allow you to quickly see and sort Alerts in the order that you pushed them up in. Please bite that Created refers to the time and date that the alert was created in ServiceNow as opposed to Time Raised which refers to the time and date the alert was raised in SCOM.

If you have configured the test creation rule as per ServiceNow Setup these alerts should be associated with a ‘Created Record’. We go further into Creation Rules here.