Automate problem ticket management

Do your operators or Help Desk staff open problem tickets manually? Are there situations when opening these tickets automatically would save time and effort and make sense?

Many companies automatically generate problem tickets for failed jobs, hardware problems, security issues, and critical messages. They use either an SNMP trap or an SMTP e-mail to open a problem ticket for an event.

Robot/CONSOLE, the Help/Systems message management and resource monitoring software, can automate this process by converting critical events to an SNMP trap or an SMTP e-mail.

Robot/CONSOLE uses rules to automate how message or resource events are handled at their source. It can suppress unimportant messages, answer common messages, make messages more important, escalate messages, start programs, and execute commands.

Robot/CONSOLE can convert an event to an SNMP trap using OPerator Assistance Language (OPAL). The OPAL code formats the event using a Management Information Base (MIB) layout for the problem ticket software. (The Help Desk administrator must compile the Robot/CONSOLE MIB into the ticketing software to allow the ticketing software to “understand” the message. Each time a new, critical event occurs, Robot/CONSOLE converts it to an SNMP trap and passes it to the ticketing software.)

With Robot/CONSOLE OPAL, you can build routines to handle multiple message IDs. Figure 1 shows an example of a Robot/CONSOLE table that handles all messages from the QCPFMSG message file related to hardware.

Figure 2 shows a Robot/CONSOLE Message Set (SNMPHRDWAR) that uses OPAL code to translate hardware errors into an SNMP trap using the Robot/CONSOLE SNDSNMPMSG operation and Robot/CONSOLE's MIB structure.

This example handles hardware errors, but the same error notification process can work for any category of error message, including job errors, application errors, security errors, device errors, backup errors, and errors from software applications such as MIMIX, BRMS, and ERP.

Because Robot/CONSOLE can send the critical error message or resource event to your problem ticket software as an SNMP trap or SMTP e-mail, you achieve much faster response time to problems.

Contributed by Tom Huntington, Vice President of Technical Services