Network Monitoring Software Integrations | Entuity Tech Talk
All right. Well, we'll get started with the pleasantries. So, uh, thanks for joining us for this tech talk on intuity. Um.
Today, uh. So I'm Jordan McPherson. I'm the director of product management at Park Place Technologies. I oversee our intuitive software and I'm joined today by Matt Miller and Pete Barts. They're couple of the smart guys, so you don't have to just hear from a product guy all the time.
The topic is kind of a broad one, but um, maybe we'll put a finer point on it. We hope to dig into kind of. It's really integrations, right.
So as you know tools have proliferated and and kind of the. Um. The world has shifted um paradigms a couple of times from you know one tool to to rule them all to you know everybody's appoint tool and now with a lot of on Prem and cloud and hybrid and and all the rest you know our our take is no one tool can or should do it all right and and. And and so really it's um. That, you know, discussion around smart integrations, right.
And so we wanted to spend some time today to. Um, wrap some definition around some different models of integration. I'm gonna try to share a slide here. Let's see how that goes. Um, so we've got. Kind of three ways that we think about intuitive integration, right.
So there's the kind of early obvious use case, right, intuity as a source of data, right. And so that's either, you know, Intuity pushing data out, right. So this is incident integrations, right? So an intuitive incident maybe really simply, right, sending an e-mail.
It's kind of an outbound integration, right? But as we kind of increase we get into automatic ticket generation, UM, and to you know, service now or or you know, whatever via API. Slack or or teams type integrations right where we wanna um. You know, sounds like a reactive data point to that tool.
The other way we see in 2D is the source is like a a pool, right? So. You've got maybe a data lake or data aggregation layer that you want to bring in. Two data for right um. So it can be, you know, mixed in with everything else and and used for better insights, right.
So that's that's another way. We also see intuity as the target, right? So um. It's not the only monitoring tool in the market, right? So there's other um other solutions out there that. Our point solutions that are going to offer data that can be used to enrich the intuitive view, right? So that might be incident or event data. From another tool used to overlay on the network data, it could be, you know, streaming data for additional metrics that can't be gathered, right? We see that with some of the use cases around the user defined polling right? So pulling in um. Pulling in monitoring data that's maybe generated in another tool or another, you know, platform, right? And then the last one is really kind of interesting and I don't, I don't know we're gonna spend a lot of time on this today, but it kind of conceptually right is.
You know intuity, uh being configured by or configuring another tool, right? So where we fit in that kind of provisioning or or? You know, in in the dev world, they call it CI CD, right? Continuous integration, continuous development with with net OPS. We're starting to see that trend come to the network, right? And so you know could be change tickets from a ticketing system that then go trigger and you know intuity to either add monitoring or or run configuration management jobs to to make that change right. So a lot of interesting automation kind of plays around there right, definitely use case that.
Umm. That's interesting, right? So um. My I think I've come off the stage.
Let me. And come back on. Um, so, um, you know, I think that uh. That's the end of the slide where at least. So we've got a couple of use cases uh put together first today. Um.
You know, I think some of you might know Peter, Matt, you know, their role with Intuity is, um, kind of twofold, right? You might know him from, you know, pre sales or or whatever else. Um. But you might also know them from. You know some of the implementation work, right. So this is um, you know, I think we call it premium support or or whatever right, where they're working on some of these solutions out there. So these are these are not theoretical S, right? Kind of deal.
So I think the, uh, the plan here is to, um kind of run through a couple of these use cases and present them um and Pete was going to give us. The. The first one which is going to be focused on the the teams integration, right, so kind of that.
So that would be intuitive as the source in the teams. Sounds good. All right. Uh, thanks, Jordan.
Let me take over from here. Uh, let's talk about teams and I'll share my screen out here as well. Generate an event here while we're waiting. So, you know, talking about intuity as a source. So, you know, just like, you know, integrations that we've got out-of-the-box with other ISM type of products, you know, ServiceNow, BMC, you know, getting into the Splunk and the slack type of environments.
You know, whether you're looking at things like pager duty or OPS Genie or there's a whole bunch of things that you can use intuity to push. Data to what I'm going to show you as an example today is going to be an integration that we're just adding four teams. So at Park Place we use teams internally.
So I thought, oh, good opportunity to show something that's new, something that's coming, something that you can leverage as well. But talk a little bit about how that is actually set up. So. Let's look at that and let's start with just, you know, what does it look like now? I'll talk about how it's built in a bit, but let's, you know, let's look at the source and then let's look at what you get at the end of it once you actually get the integration working.
So I've got a device in my environment that's actually looking at. You'll probably recognize this device actually. It's been used for other tech talks when we talk about API polling, but I'm actually generating in a in an event and an alert based on a thunderstorm warning over in Ohio. So it's winter, probably don't get many thunderstorms, but this is an event that's coming into the system and from a team's perspective, which might be a little bit different than like a service now in environment, a teams perspective, you would normally want to push something that's new into that Channel as a notify to say I've got something going on that I need to pay attention to.
So the integration that we're going to look at is incident pushed to teams. So here's the incident that we've got as an example. You'll see that in the UI and if I look at that from a team's perspective.
I've now got an integration where I've built a channel. It's gonna narrow this down so I can see the right stuff. But I've built a channel and I've actually added in a A managed channel here that I can leverage. I just called it Demo 20 and incidents.
I'm actually seeing that specific incident in here. I'll talk about a little bit how this is formatted because this is a little bit different teams, a little bit different than other products where you've actually got the ability to do some formatting of the data that's coming into the into the environment and that's actually done as part of the action. But it's a really straightforward thing.
I see an incident that's critical, that I want to pay attention to. I take an action and push it over into a defined teams channel. Now let's look a little bit on how that's set up. So how would you
actually do that? And this is. Fairly generic in terms of even other products, right? Whatever product that you want to be able to integrate with teams being one example. You know the first step is, you know, what does teams require for an API connection and how do I actually set up that endpoint within teams. So if it's slack, how do I set up the slack channel? Every product is going to be a little bit different, but I'll walk you through what I did in terms of teams right here.
So initially I went into my channel and created a brand new managed channel here. So I actually went through and created a channel and I came up with a name, you know. I manage this one.
I just called it Demo 20, the only 2D incidents from a team's perspective. That's basically all that all that you have to do there. But the important part is really that next step. So I'm going to go through, I'm going to manage this or I'm going to manage the connectors. So how do I connect into this channel? Teams uses an API key, so similar to slack, similar to other products you know you're going to have to build an API key that Intuity can actually send to. That would actually send to this demo 20 into the incidents channel.
Now you can have multiple channels. You can actually have the same channel that's being that's receiving incidents from multiple intuity servers. So if you're handling a mall server construction and that type of an environment, once you set up this connector, you can use this connector and put it on all the polling servers and send everything into one channel. Let's take a look at this and. Let's manage the existing configured web hook that I've got in the system. So I've got one web hook configured.
You would normally hit the configure button. If you going to create a new one, type in the name that you want. And then you can upload an image. I've done that. It actually hasn't been absorbed into the system yet. Teams takes a little bit once you set this up. Actually.
Know that it's there and can actually receive information from intuity. So if you don't see events right away or incidents right away, don't worry, just give it a little bit of time to get baked into the team system. But once I've got an image I can pick that you know this is the one that would end up showing up on in my teams environment. The API key is right here.
So this is actually going to build an API key. It's really simple. All I do is copy this to the clipboard. And this is actually the API key and the path to this channel that I'm going to use in the action. So compared to other products to use, actually really straightforward to be able to set up.
Let's flip this around and take a look at the. Intuity side. So the first step is to build an action, and again the action definition is something that will make available. I think Jordan pushed people to the support. Open up a support ticket and just query on the teams integration for right now.
Eventually this will be added into the standard product. But for the time being, getting access through support is probably the best route. But I've added a new action. Uh, let's take a look at this.
And again, this is really straightforward. The details behind this is going to be in. The actual. Groovy definition right here. So this action and I'll show you this a little larger type in a minute, but effectively taking the groovy script that defines the action.
And also leverages a path, so the path here is the parameter that you would use to plug in the API key. And when my action definition, I've kept the path to be blank. The reason for that is when I create a in 2D trigger, somebody created an incident trigger.
I can actually have different triggers going to different channels. So I can build as many channels as I want in teams for different purposes. I can take each one of those API keys and those path definitions and use them in an individual trigger. So I've built the action, I've put it in place. I'm going to leverage that action and build a trigger. Now in my case. Yeah, I set this up to just, uh, send a notification to teams when an incident initially opened.
Again, just like any other trigger. You can change this to, you know, forward every change, or just open and close, or open and expired, whatever the state is that you'd like. But you can also put conditions against this. So if it's a firewall problem, put it in the firewall channel.
If it's a problem with the specific site or some specific condition that you want to pay attention to and. Treat separately. Leverage the condition capabilities and a trigger to do that.
The action. Again, this is my defined action that I've added and in here I'm going to actually leverage the API key that I've got. To make this look just a bit bigger, the key in this in this purpose for this purpose is really not relevant. You're going to have your own key, but just in close your your path and that API key that you get out of teams, put it in quotes. That's really it. So I've created this,
I've defined it, I've got it enabled, I've got it set up in my system. And deployed as far as my project. So I'll take, you know, I'll go back to what we started with. And let's generate another.
Event generator weather event. And based on this because I'm opening up. An event. I'm going to actually see this,
and it would actually see this in. My. Teams channel right here. So pretty straightforward to put together.
Again, the details behind this as far as the action definition is something that you can get access to from our support group. Um. But actually enabling this and setting it up is actually pretty straight, you know, again, pretty straightforward to do. Now let's look at one other thing, because the formatting of this can be really nice and, you know, being able to control the formatting.
No again makes this. You know, much easier to actually read or actually focus on what's really going on, including this view incident button down here. Let's look at the actual action definition. And this is the same one that I showed you in the UI.
And for the most part. Pretty much this is boilerplate information, but let's get down to the the actual body definition right here. So this is the JSON body that I'm actually. Assembling. And what you'll see in here is the ability to set my time, set my type, set my fonts, set the size, do some formatting.
All the way down for each one of these blocks that are in the message. And again, different products are going to be different. Splunk is different than teams.
Certainly ServiceNow is going to be different because you're just sending the data to service now and service now is going to do the processing. But this is really interesting because not only do you just forward the incident over, but you can do some formatting against it. And you can actually pull in an interactive URL.
So this is the URL for that incident and the component that it's associated to. And from here I can actually just select view incident and log back into the system and actually go directly to Mayfield Heights to see what's going on. So a quick way to go directly to Intuity, right from teams. I think that's about it, Jordan. Any questions that you can think of? Otherwise I'll turn it back to you. No, I I think um, based on kind of the the calm and the chat, I think you.
Took us through it pretty well, right? Um, and. I know that the first time I saw the the teams integration was. Really kind of interesting, because it was. I'd say surprising, um. How easy for a team standpoint right. Normally uh we think about Microsoft and and um you know permissions and licenses and and kind of a real pain but.
It was refreshing to see how easy that was to from a team side, right? Um, so pretty good stuff there. Yeah, I mean, I I spent probably less than 30 minutes setting this up in our demo environment this morning. But just to do another iteration of actually the setup setup is really straightforward. Yep. OK. And if there's any other questions, feel free to to put them in the chat.
We can come back or we'll answer them offline afterwards. But I think with that, Pete, thanks a lot. And then I am going to bring.
Matt up here and uh. And and so Matt, um tell us a little bit about high level the seemed to be integration with service now I know. That's a pretty common um. You know, ISM and and and kind of use case, right? We hear that. We hear that a lot.
Just talk quickly kind of what, um, what we get out of this. Cool. So I'm just gonna share my screen. So with. ServiceNow, CMDB, CMDB integration or probably most other CMDB's you can pull pretty much any data out of intuity using Intuitives Rest API. So we have like a data access template. So that's what you can see on my screen here.
It's a bit of XML that you provide a name to it. You say what type of objects you want to export data on, and you can define the attributes that you want to export. So in this case we're getting things like Mac address, manufacturer, model.
And what will happen is you send an HTTP post request with this XML as the the payload to your intuity server. And then you can now call that that template. Um. So we can see here we've got our API data access, then the template name.
And we've got, we've provided an apparent parameter with the the view. So we in this case we're saying all objects. So as you can see we've got all other devices on this server. This is an output we can get and in this case it's XML.
We can also get it in Jason format. And obviously if you're maybe you've got multiple customers on your server, you might have one customer that wants to export to their CMDB. You could put all their devices in a particular view. And change the URL here to be their view and then they can use that URL.
So with this information we can use service now. Um, to pull that data out. So I won't go through all the details of how it could be set up in service now as there's a fair bit to it, but. If I just go to oops. Shift to jobs.
So what I have done is we have a scheduled job basically in ServiceNow set up. The run a script that. ServiceNow uses and basically ServiceNow is going to call that URL. With some extra parameters so it can do pagination so we can get as much of the information that we needed as possible. It's going to put all that data into a staging table within service now and then.
Service now has things like transform maps which transform to data in that staging table and places it into. The CMDB, the actual table where it's going to be stored. Now obviously ServiceNow is based in the cloud and it needs to speak to your intuity server O with service. Now they have a thing called a mid server. So it's a bit of software that can run within your network and it has the ability to talk to your intuitive server and then it can also talk out to service now.
So when when you set this up. If you're using surface now that you, obviously you would need to. Configure it so that it uses that mid server and then it can talk to you intuitive server.
The once you have this set up you can obviously schedule it to run daily, weekly, or execute now if you wanted to. And that should if we just go and have a look in here. Pulling all the data that we we set out in that data export template. No data access template, sorry. And you can see here we've got some devices from that server.
So if we just take a look at one of these. There's not a huge amount of data that we're pulling out, but you can see we've got the manufacturer model. I've got IP address, serial number. And as I mentioned at the beginning, you can pull out pretty much any information that INTUITY has on a particular object of type of object. So it doesn't just have to be sort of static attributes like serial number or model.
It could also be time series data and we could get the most recent sample from a particular stream like CPU or we could get a range of samples as well. If that's something that was needed. So that's sort of. A very sort of simple example of how to integrate with a CMDB. We've we've done it with other customers and it's been a bit more complicated. No, see, that's, uh, this seems like something that would be as complicated as, UM, as your environment, right? Yeah, the question I have is, you know, we're showing kind of the creation step and I'm assuming that.
Just as easily this could be um. Adding into an existing asset or whatever, right. So it's it's an enrich as opposed to a create yet. So that's something I've we've done before.
So what you'll see is that obviously there's normally like a a correlation. ID or something along that line that you can use to uniquely identify a particular object. So we've done it before with a a serial number where we were pulling data in from intuity for devices looking at their serial numbers and matching them up to two devices they already had in CMDB via their serial numbers. And obviously there were some rules put in place for when maybe the serial number didn't exist or there was duplicate serial numbers, things like that.
But yeah, it can be done to enrich something already there. And then um, we've got a a guide published on the support site for this that kind of captures your notes. So if anybody wants to, um. Yeah. Do the slow version right. Um, I know demos can be a little bit whirlwind right, but that's.
So that's their, uh on the support website. Yeah, exactly. Yes. So that will, there's some steps in there that you can set up service now to do sort of a simple integration and then obviously you could extend it from there if you wanted to. Great.
Any um. Yeah. Any questions on? Format here I I've got we got one more use case that is a little less generic, but it really wanted to present it as kind of a. Art of the possible, I just put the link for the support article kind of summarizing this integration. Steps right? So kind of examples.
So with that, let me try to make this work. That they give me too many buttons and I want to use them all. Um. So. We should see um. Central Park dashboard being shared now.
That. Just get a. Pause there for a second, um.
So this is a QA instance of our our customer portal, right, that we deliver our services on and so we've worked pretty hard to integrate intuity kind of front and back here, right. So I would say we've got some you know real basic integrations like a like a cross launch function that really just you know brings you into you know intuitive, right. We've also got um ticketing integration from Intuity into our support platforms. And so how that ends up looking is, you know, we have a ticket that gets opened, um. With the with the data, um. But then also has you know, callback, right? So we can go from.
Support portal directly you know in context to the to the affected device, right? So that can be really helpful, right, as we're trying to um, you know, integrate some of the intuity into our standard service delivery. The other piece that we do, um, is using data access templates, right? So um. We have intuity assets that get pulled into our umm to a customer's asset view, right. So in this case we see the asset sources intuity here and then when I kinda click in then I get my intuit data that we've pulled in. We also you know if there's other services associated with this with this device, we would add those, right. And then again we've got kind of that cross launch function back into the.
The context and intuitive for that device, right? So. Uh, this is a lot of, uh, you know, principles of of what we're looking at today, whether it be, um, you know, push pull or or pulling type data. Integrating that for kind of a business use case, right, so um.
The, you know, other piece I'll just add is, um, that just popped into my head, right. Um, obviously it's, you know, our our portal, our software. And so you would think like, oh, they should have pretty good integrations. They can cheat.
The um. All of this integration is based off the public APIs and and. And what's in the product today? So we're not doing anything. Tricky or or you know cute or taking advantage of the fact that you know it's it's our software right.
So this is all based off of you know just the available APIs right and the what we've talked about today so. Um. And obviously, there'll be more integrations as we go, right? But these are kind of our our early use cases, if you will. Bring everybody back up here as we kind of close towards the end of the the the demo here, right and I want to. Um. You know, just bring up that the the scripts will be available through support, right? Uh, along with um. Some documentation around, uh, putting them in and and bringing them together. I think the, you know,
the big thing for me kind of greedily is, you know, understanding. What? Um, what tools you guys are using? Um. What integration use cases make sense, right? I mean some of this is. You know, really limited by.
What's the business case? Right? Uh, what are the tools that are out there? Uh, but we're definitely, uh, looking to incorporate more of these things into the product natively and and and. Kind of build out this functionality because we understand that this is an ecosystem, right? We want to be a good, a good citizen, if you will. So if anybody has any. Integration use cases or questions or how would we, uh, you know, go ahead and send them straight in. I'd love to hear them, you know. Um.
I am a I'm a big fan of good idea fairies, right? So, uh, I'd love to hear it, love to talk about it. So. Yeah, please let us know and and if we need to dig in on a tech talk and another one down the road, we certainly can. And I have my one marketing mandated uh ask, which is I think Larry earlier shared a link for G2. You know, so that's the. Analyst pages and um. And it would be really helpful, you know, if you guys can head over and and and fill those out.
I'm told uh told there's Amazon gift cards, um available for these things, and if that would violate any. Corporate gift giving rules, right? Um, you know you can also choose to donate them. Um. Larry, if you could? Put that link in again. I think it might have come a little too soon for the meeting. Maybe. And then Nick Van Allen asked, do you have integration with open telemetry collectors or anything for Prometheus Telegraph? So I don't think we have anything.
Um. That I can quickly Alt tab over and and show um, I think the interesting question would be. There is, uh, you know, thinking back to the the models, right? What do we want to do right? Are we looking to um? Shift uh ship data into uh into Prometheus from uh like EMS standpoint or is it more of uh? We want to pull data, we want to bring in data from open telemetry into intuity. So I think that would be probably the 1st place to start. It's just kind of, you know what's the story we want to tell with the data. And and you know the business problem we're trying to solve, um, and then from there I think it would.
Kind of be done the solutioning path of how that would integrate. We have done some integrations with other tools where we're either, you know, accepting web hooks on like incident data or you know, using defined polling to pull in stream data and and enrich that on intuity devices, right? So it's. There's some. Even I would say low code solutions there.
Uh, depending on the other tools right? The user defined pollers? Um. Pretty pretty approachable from a, you know, usually with integrations the answer is always, you know, we've got an API and. And you know, I always hear, you know, do you have developers, right? Yeah, you do whatever you want if you have developers, um.
So we tried to make this stuff as as approachable as possible. Is it possible to get the ticket number from ServiceNow into intuity? So thinking yeah, so push your ticket to service now or push an incident to ServiceNow, open a ticket and then we want to pull that back and. And add it as an annotation to an intuity ticket or in 2D incident or or maybe a custom field. Peter, Matt, either you want to talk about that a little bit? Yeah actually using the uh, the existing API's you can post back to an incident.
So in a case where you would get. Um, and you know you would use the. Action to be able to send a service now.
You'd include the incident ID. Based on that incident ID, you could actually build a workflow and service now to push. A annotation update or an extra field that would include the snow ticket back into intuitive you'd build.
Man, is that just me. No, I can't hear. OK. Nope, it was OK. Pete, I think we lost your your your mic. I've been having some PC problems so I assumed it was me, but I I think I think where he was going was there's workflows and service now that you can use the incident ID from intuity to.
To then correlate back that ticket number and write it back, right? So it's. It's a little bit of work. You know, from the intuitive side, we've got the ServiceNow integration today and then there's probably some additional effort in service now to get the right back to work. Is that a, is that a fair summation from 40,000 feet, Pete? I.
Yeah, ohh no I missed it. OK um. So yeah, maybe we'll have to uh, uh schedule a bigger talk on two way ticket integration with service now that. Yeah, cool. Um. No, that's an interesting one.
And and really the where we're at same integration with Cisco teams, I'm not familiar with Cisco teams. Is that part of the Jabber suite or is that something different? As a Google furiously. Let's go Webex teams. I bought that. So it's a similar product, it's like Slack, it's like teams, but it's the Cisco version, OK. Um.
You know, I think what we'd have to do is look at the UM. You know what APIs are available there for messaging and um. All that right, but. That shouldn't be too much different than what we're talking about for Microsoft Teams.
What we're seeing right now is. You know a lot of orgs in a. Uh, I've been.
Moving to teams, uh, you know, if they're Office 365 just because it's kind of included, right? But this is a good call out to to go read about. Um. So yeah. So just the final plug for G2 um and then a confirmation that um. You know, if you guys have any other integrations, I'm going to certainly go look at the Cisco teams API documentation. For integrations, um. But you know, we've got um.
Some use cases where we've done work with, you know, OPS Genie. Where we've done um. You know, I think I heard something about a Twilio integration that that's maybe out there in the wild somewhere, right? So there's a lot of different use cases that are out there, but if you have more, right, I mean that's the No2 works are the same or or same business cases requirements, so. You know, just asking for that feedback so that we can incorporate. So thanks a lot and with that I'll stop rambling to fill time and give you the rest of your day back. And thanks so much for coming.
Thanks Pete, Matt for being up here with me. Thanks everyone. Take care.
2023-03-09 11:40
