Does anyone create tickets for abended jobs automatically from UC4?

[Lennie Currington]

We use the CA CASD ticketing system, and would like to automatically create tickets for jobs that abend based on the acceptable return code from UC4. The sale people say that this is possible and I would like to know if anyone has done this and can point me in the correct direction to set this up

[Pete Wirfs]

UC4 objects have a set of 'runtime' options where you can set your desired runtime behaviors.  One of those configurable behaviors is what to do if the return code is not zero.   We have configured ours to execute a script object that does multiple things, such as alert oncall staff and open a trouble ticket.  (We use different scripts for different support teams, so the alerts go to the appropriate staff.)

 

I don't know the CASD ticketing system, so I don't personally know how to open a ticket with that product.

[Michael Pirson]

We've done this with Servicenow and not with CASD. However I would image it is very similar. We use the Webservice Agent and REST APIs to open and update the tickets. 

 

I would assume that CASD has a REST API developers guide that should be very helpful for this.

[Pete Wirfs]

In our case, we send an SMTP email to open a Servicenow ticket.

[B Bharath Kumar Reddy]

Hi, we are also using the ServiceNow. Can you please provide some documentation for this?

[Alvin Lee]

Hi Michael,

Can you share details on how you guys implemented Webservice Agent and REST APIs to open and update the tickets. 

Regards,
Alvin

[Michael A. Lowry]

We built something like this:

• Every workflow has the same standard notification object specified. This is the object that will be executed if any task in the workflow ends in error.
  
• The notification object is actually a workflow. It does several things:
  • It looks up details about the abended task, including the error handling instructions the batch owner has defined. Every job must have error handling instructions defined, and these options are defined in an external database. Failure actions include rerun, cancel, and open ticket.
  • Actions that can be performed directly in the AE, like rerun, are performed in the Automation Engine.
  • For actions like open ticket, or if no error handling instructions can be found, the notification workflow looks up the assignment group for the failed job and sends this information to the monitoring application via the WebServices REST agent.
• The monitoring application creates a new incident in ITSM (SNOW) and assigns it to the previously looked-up assignment group.

[Pete Wirfs]

I'm curious to know how other shops manage oncall staff assignments.  I've looked into PagerDuty, but it is too expensive for this small shop.  I've looked a little bit into ServiceNow capabilities, but I don't really understand it well enough.  

 

I wrote an Excel workbook about 15 years ago that we are still using.  It keeps staff details on a master sheet, and pulls the details into oncall team sheets.  VBA script auto-rotates the teams at the right time (once a week), sends everyone email alerts to their duty status, and saves a copy of the results in a CSV file that UC4 reads and applies at task failure time.  A very strange feature we have here is the concept that there are always 2 people oncall for any given team; a primary and a backup.  This relaxes the expectation that primary will be available 100% of the time, and reduces the stress on the operations staff when the primary is unavailable.

 

We have one team though that manages their team outside of this facility.  They have set up a telephone number that is their point of contact, and they manage the telephone number so it auto-forwards to the primary person who is expected to provide 100% availability.    This means UC4 has no idea who is oncall for this team, but they don't support any batch systems so it has been a non-issue.

[Shashank Singh]

We use ServiceNow and have auto tickets for every UC4 job failure. The process is simple.

You need to contact your servicenow team. They will ask you to configure their email ID in all UC4 job abend alerts.

Once the alerts reach Servicenow mailbox, they program it to generate tickets. 

 

Major work is at servicenow end. At UC4 end, we just need to configure their email ID for alerts and inform them the format of ticket creation.

 

Regards,

Shashank