New Integration Request - PRTG

[Logan Graham]

Hi All,

Something that was mentioned at Insights was if we wanted a new integration adding to post it here, forgive me if it already exist but I couldn't see it when trying to set up a process.

We use PRTG as monitoring here and as I understand it, it is used by quite a few companies so I am surprised it hasn't been requested/set up already. 

One of the things we would like to do with this is acknowledge alarms with the Hornbill ticket reference as the message. Then once the ticket has been resolved to rescan the sensor to check it all comes back up. Also if possible to make is so if a sensor goes down instead of sending a email it links into hornbill and just raises a ticket with custom text.

For us personally it would be good for automation if this could be added, my API knowledge isnt the best so hopefully what I am asking for makes sense.

Here is the link for the API setup of PRTG if it is any help.

https://www.paessler.com/manuals/prtg/application_programming_interface_api_definition

Thanks in advance,

Logan G

[James Ainsworth]

Hi Logan,

Thanks for your post. 

Someone from the integration team will have a look and get back to you.  This usually starts with a look at the capabilities of the APIs that are provided by the supplier.  It is also possible that we already have this is a list of planned integrations.  It will probably be next week before someone can look at this and respond. 

Regards,

James

[Gerry]

@Logan Graham

Is this software a cloud application? or installed behind your firewall?  The Hornbill iBridge is focused on cloud applications.   Granted, some customers have used it for plugging into behind-the-firewall integrations (for example with Jira) but that involves punching a hole in their firewill and exposing their internal application's API to the internet accessible endpoint, this is not really what the iBridge is designed to do.  As we move forward with our ITOM offering, behind-the-firewall integrations with other software is very much on the agenda, and we could certainly look at PRTG.   I do not know PRTG so dont know the semantics of how it works, I would be interested to understand more details about what an integration would look like - what are you trying to achieve by integrating Hornbill with PRTG?  From your brief description, I think you are talking more about the ITOM Site Integration services we are introducing. 

Gerry

[Logan Graham]

@Gerrythanks for the reply, yes I think you are right might of got my wires crossed, PRTG is done behind our firewall so this would make sense as it has a physical server, might have to look at other ways of doing what I want or possibly wait till ITOM is up and running and see how it works fully. As for what I am trying to achieve PRTG is a monitoring tool that checks out infrastructure and basically we have to manually log in to PRTG and check sensors if they are down etc. So what I was looking to do was to have it contact Hornbill log a ticket when a sensor is down and then acknowledge the alarm automatically with the ticket number. The logging of a ticket in Hornbill is easy as I can just get it to send an email to Hornbill and auto raise but its the auto acknowledging part that it something I cannot do. 

Thanks again,

Logan G

[dwalby]

On 6/28/2019 at 10:01 AM, Logan Graham said:

@Gerrythanks for the reply, yes I think you are right might of got my wires crossed, PRTG is done behind our firewall so this would make sense as it has a physical server, might have to look at other ways of doing what I want or possibly wait till ITOM is up and running and see how it works fully. As for what I am trying to achieve PRTG is a monitoring tool that checks out infrastructure and basically we have to manually log in to PRTG and check sensors if they are down etc. So what I was looking to do was to have it contact Hornbill log a ticket when a sensor is down and then acknowledge the alarm automatically with the ticket number. The logging of a ticket in Hornbill is easy as I can just get it to send an email to Hornbill and auto raise but its the auto acknowledging part that it something I cannot do. 

Thanks again,

Logan G

+1 for this exact functionality

[Steve G]

Hi @Logan Graham and @dwalby,

I've just had a cursory look at this, as I've not come across PRTG before, and it looks like everything you need to do is already possible with PRTG and a little PowerShell.

From the PRTG knowledgebase, it appears to be possible to execute PowerShell scrips as custom notification types, and if this is correct then it'd be fairly trivial to build a script to log an incident in Hornbill and populate one of the custom fields with the sensor/alarm ID. We have example PowerShell scripts that talk to Hornbill if you search the TechNet Gallery for Hornbill. Note, the example scripts there require a couple of modules to be installed from the PowerShell Gallery. Again, just search for Hornbill.

Once the custom notification script has raised an incident in Hornbill, you can read the incident reference back from the logIncident API call, and use the Acknowledge-Sensor cmdlet from the following interface to acknowledge the alarm: https://github.com/lordmilko/PrtgAPI

None of this has been tested, of course, and you'll need someone in your organisations who know PRTG and PowerShell to implement, but I'm happy to help if you need any pointers when building the scripts to make the API calls in to Hornbill.

Cheers,

Steve

[Logan Graham]

Hi @Steve G thanks for looking into this and the info! I did know about the powershell scripting for PRTG mostly was down to what it sends, if you just use email notify it sends a load of information not actually needed. I will take a look to see if I can tweak a few scripts to do what I want, think I was dreaming of a nicer way than scripting not something I enjoying having to do. I did forget about the hornbill scripts as i know they were mentioned at insights. 

Thanks again.

[Gerry]

@Logan Graham

I hope that once ITOM is generally available we should be able to build and provide a more ready-to-use integration with PRTG, its on our list to look at. 

Gerry