Although the capability of integrating performance data from 3rd-party monitoring software into BPPM is still very limited, the capability of integrating events (alerts) from 3rd-party monitoring software into BPPM is extremely powerful and flexible.
Why do you want to integrate events from 3rd-party monitoring software into BPPM?
First of all, if you have a NOC team monitoring the alerts sent from different monitoring tools, it would make sense for the NOC team to watch one computer screen instead of multiple computer screens.
Second, if you use Remedy to create incident tickets, BPPM has a fast and reliable native integration with Remedy ticket system. And the integration license is included in BPPM license. If the 3rd-party monitoring tool doesn't have its own integration with Remedy, integrating its events into BPPM would instantly add that capability. If the 3rd-party monitoring tool requires you to buy a separate license for Remedy integration, integrating its events into BPPM would be a great cost saving.
Third, by having events from different monitoring tools in the same event database, you can develop correlation rules to create tickets only on root cause components thus to eliminate large number of unnecessary Remedy tickets. For example, when a switch down event from network monitor caused 100 server down events in server monitor, you only need to create a Remedy ticket for switch down event.
BMC provides three general-purpose methods to integrate events from 3rd-party monitoring software into BPPM: msend API, SNMP trap adapter, and iiSDK. I have personally used all three. I highly recommend msend API as the easiest and most reliable integration method. So far over 90% of my integration work is based on msend API.
In addition, if your 3rd-party monitoring software cannot call msend API but can send emails, you can use email as the 4th method for event integration.
In the next few posts, I will discuss each method in detail.
Very informative article Willa. Just a concern though, I have seen msend utility hangs if there are bulk events from source. Does BMC gives any data regarding the event processing rate of msend. What should be done in such scenarios?
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