Event Matching

Monitoring tools are very useful because they can detect that something has gone wrong even before end-users start calling the service desk. By passing the events from system management applications to 4me, a request gets generated for each event. These requests are automatically assigned to the correct team so that they get resolved as quickly as possible.

In many cases, however, monitoring tools generate multiple events for a single incident. If, for example, the issue has not been resolved after a certain amount of time has elapsed, or when the situation has gotten better or worse, another event gets generated. This information could be useful for the support specialists, but things get confusing if a new request gets registered for each update. It works better when the updates get added to the original request.

To enable this, we recently added a new feature to the Events API and the Mail API. For each incoming event, this feature checks whether there’s an open request that was generated for a previous event from the same monitoring tool and for the same configuration item. If this is the case, the new event will not cause a new request to get generated. Instead, the update information is added as a new note to the existing request.

Also, when the new event contains exactly the same information as one of the previous events, then this information does not get added again. That ensures that all the information in the request is relevant for the specialists and they do not waste time going through duplicate notes.