Service Desk and Helpdesk Integration
Large organizations operating AggreGate Network Manager do not practice direct handling of alerts by their acknowledgment within the monitoring/management system. These alerts are instead automatically converted into trouble tickets and forwarded to a Service Desk system for further processing. The Service Desk employs a flexible ticket processing workflow that includes multiple ticket queues, ticket locking, escalations, and more.
The Network Manager provides multiple methods of integration with third-party Helpdesk and Service Desk systems:
| Using off-the-shelf connectors available for well-known trouble ticketing systems, both commercial and free |
| Targeting a standard notification email to a mailbox that is handled by a Service Desk |
| Sending a non-standard mail message to a Service Desk by the AggreGate alert's corrective action |
| Sending an enriched Syslog message or an SNMP trap which will be received by a Service Desk and converted to a ticket |
| Executing a script which connects to a Helpdesk server using its API and injects a new ticket |
Network Inventory and CMDB Actualization
Major Service Desk systems have internal Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs). Those CMDBs contain information about the registered IT assets.
A CMDB is manually filled with the information about "passive" (i.e. non-connected) assets. Plus, most Service Desk systems can perform periodic multiple network segments scanning and retrieving information about the available hardware and software. This scanning is performed from a central Service Desk server, therefore has limited access to the company's IT infrastructure.
AggreGate Network Manager can actively actualize CMDB of the integrated Service Desk system by supplying comprehensive information collected by multiple servers in a distributed installation:
| Models, makes, serials, and custom properties of the active network equipment |
| Hardware configuration of servers and workstations (CPUs, memory, disks, etc.) |
| Configuration and supply status of network printers |
| Information about the installed software and operating system updates |
