In the ever-changing world of IT, keeping your systems running smoothly is crucial. By integrating SolarWinds with Service Reliability Management (SRM), you can upgrade your approach, moving beyond traditional event management to something much more proactive and effective.
More importantly, you can now enrich your monitoring data with more impact awareness of SLOs and remaining Error budgets. Using SRM you can attach your SolarWinds alerting as Service Level Indicators, and coordinate a targeted response based on the context of your business. Here’s how you can set up a SolarWinds push connector in SRM and why it’s a smart move.
Read more on SRM here: Introducing Service Reliability Management for Service Operations Workspace
Core Capabilities of SRM that take your Event Management Maturity level up a notch are:
- Federated Team Access
- Service Registration and Management
- Service Aware Integrations
- Distributed Alert Automation Capabilities
Setting Up a SolarWinds Push Connector in SRM
Connecting SolarWinds with SRM involves creating a push connector to send data directly to SRM for real-time monitoring and analysis. Here’s a simple guide to get you started. Push connectors are easier than ever to setup within SRM, each Service can onboard it’s own custom push connector via Integration Launchpad.
After your services are set up and registered in SRM, you can integrate SolarWinds via push connector with these steps:
STEP 1: Open your Service, and navigate to Integrations
STEP 2: Select Custom Push Connector
STEP 3: Fill out the appropriate fields (name, description, source name)
STEP 4: Setup Field Mapping, For this step you will need to define the Alert JSON payload coming from Solar Winds. You can start with this template:
{
"status": "${N=Alerting;M=Severity}",
"alert": "${N=Alerting;M=AlertMessage}",
"host": "${N=SWQL;M=SELECT TOP 1 RelatedNodeCaption FROM Orion.AlertObjects WHERE AlertObjectID = ${N=Alerting;M=AlertObjectID} }",
"object": "${N=SWQL;M=SELECT TOP 1 EntityCaption FROM Orion.AlertObjects WHERE AlertObjectID = ${N=Alerting;M=AlertObjectID} }",
"object_type": "${N=Alerting;M=ObjectType}",
"description": "${N=Alerting;M=AlertDescription}",
"solarwinds_url": "${N=Alerting;M=AlertDetailsUrl}",
"acknowledged": "${N=Alerting;M=Acknowledged}",
"acknowledged_by": "${N=Alerting;M=AcknowledgedBy}",
"timestamp": "${N=SWQL;M=SELECT GETUTCDATE() as a1 FROM Orion.Engines}",
"solarwinds_object_id": "${N=Alerting;M=AlertObjectID}",
"Active": "True",
}
Complete the field mapping setup. Note, you can come back and adjust mapping later.
STEP 5: Install the connector on SolarWinds.
First you will want to grab the URL from your ServiceNow instance that has been created for this integration. And Decide how you want to setup Authentication: Basic Auth, or API/Token based.
REF Token Based Auth: https://www.servicenow.com/community/itom-articles/inbound-rest-api-keys-for-event-management-connec...
NOTE: This is supported OOB after Washington Release.
STEP 6: Setup the action in SolarWinds, To Create new actions in SolarWinds:
- Navigate to Alerts > Manage Alerts.
- Select any alert and click Edit Alert
- Click the Trigger Actions step and then click Add Action.
- Select Send a GET or POST Request to a Web Server.
- Click Configure Action.
- Fill in the Action Pane with the following details:
- Name of Action: <<Service ABC – Send to ServiceNow>>
- URL: <<URL from STEP 5>> + API Token, or Headers for Auth Information
- Select Use HTTP/S POST
- Body to Post: <<JSON Body from STEP 4>>
- Content Type: Replace with application/json
- Time of Day: No additional schedule for this action needed
- Execution Settings: Leave as-Is
- Click Add Action
- Click the Reset Actions step and then repeat steps 4 - 7, using the Clear Action template instead of the Trigger Action template. NOTE Active changes to FALSE -> we can key off that in ServiceNow to auto-resolve the alerts.
{
"status": "${N=Alerting;M=Severity}",
"alert": "${N=Alerting;M=AlertMessage}",
"host": "${N=SWQL;M=SELECT TOP 1 RelatedNodeCaption FROM Orion.AlertObjects WHERE AlertObjectID = ${N=Alerting;M=AlertObjectID} }",
"object": "${N=SWQL;M=SELECT TOP 1 EntityCaption FROM Orion.AlertObjects WHERE AlertObjectID = ${N=Alerting;M=AlertObjectID} }",
"object_type": "${N=Alerting;M=ObjectType}",
"description": "${N=Alerting;M=AlertDescription}",
"solarwinds_url": "${N=Alerting;M=AlertDetailsUrl}",
"acknowledged": "${N=Alerting;M=Acknowledged}",
"acknowledged_by": "${N=Alerting;M=AcknowledgedBy}",
"timestamp": "${N=SWQL;M=SELECT GETUTCDATE() as a1 FROM Orion.Engines}",
"solarwinds_object_id": "${N=Alerting;M=AlertObjectID}",
"Active": "False",
}
Click through NEXT and Submit this Alert Action.
STEP 7: Test and Validate alerts are flowing into ServiceNow and are related to your Registered Service.
Repeat as necessary for different Services that have monitoring from SolarWinds.
Setting up SLOs, SLIs and Error Budgets
- Service Level Objective (SLO) - "When do we take action?"
An SLO is a service level objective: a target value or range of values for a service level that is measured by an SLI.
- Service Level Indicator (SLI) - "What do we measure?"
An SLI is a service level indicator—a carefully defined quantitative measure of some aspect of the level of service that is provided.
- Error Budget – “How much SLO can we spend?”
An error budget is the amount of SLO that you can spend over a specified time. It can be used to either accelerate or deaccelerate the delivery of new features. It is typically based on availability, latency, and so forth.
Now that you have event data flowing from SolarWinds you can setup track SLOs based on the indicators from those Alerts.
STEP 1: The first step in defining reliability metrics is the Service Level Objective.
In the same onboarding screen of your Service you can select Reliability metrics and Create a new SLO.
Name of SLO, Type, Duration, Objective % of time, Compliance period, and Name of Assignment Group (auto-populated)
STEP 2: Add an SLI, using the SolarWinds monitoring data to know which alerts burn down the SLO.
For Example: Create an SLI for alerts that come in with the metric name ‘availability’ and Source is ‘SolarWinds’
STEP 3: OPTIONAL -> Add an Error Budget response.
Do you want to create an incident or send an email when the threshold has been reached?
You can add an error budget policy later by opening the SLO and selecting the Error budget policies tab.
STEP 4: Save and Activate
From here you are now ready to roll with SolarWinds feeding into your Platform and amplifying the impact with SLIs against your SLOs.
For more details on Service Reliability Management:
- Navigating Service Reliability: Insights into SLOs, SLIs, and Error Budgets
- Elevating Service Reliability Management with Seamless Mobile Experience
- Maximizing IT Service Reliability: ServiceNow's SRM and Strategic SLOs
- Creating an incident prevention workflow with AIOps
- Team based On-Call management with SRM
- ServiceNow On-call Scheduling in Service Operations Workspace Setup Demo (With Twilio)
If you are ready to get started with SRM, NowCreate has some great resources to give you a framework and path to production: Service Reliability Management - Process Workshop Presentation
