Handling Mail from Monitoring Systems

[Phil Williams]

What is the best practice for handling email notifications from monitoring systems into the service desk?

So this morning I came into a queue of around 50 tickets generated by the monitoring systems we use. This was expected as we are now piping email alerts into the service desk rather than a shared mailbox. Now the problem is the volume of new monitoring tickets is masking actual support issues as a new ticket is opened up for every alert status change. What I'm looking for is a way to consolidate the tickets automatically as they arrive.

For example:

1) Monitoring picks up an issue with a server and sends an email with the subject "Server IP 1.2.3.4 is DOWN"

2) An engineer either resolves the problem with the server or the alert is a "flap" and it resolves itself

3) The monitoring systems sends out another email with the subject ""Server IP 1.2.3.4 is UP" however this is added as a comment to the original alert ticket rather than a new ticket

The problem I face is associating the two emails with very similar, but different, subject lines to the same issue ticket. the alerts do come from the same sender and always the follow the same format if that makes a difference.

Any ideas?

[Consulente Atlassian]

I agree it's not exactly the right answer for your question, but in the past I've chosen not to adopt email notifications and instead of using this plugin for nagios/JIRA 

this https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1211137/nagios-for-jira?hosting=server&tab=overview

and this

https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1217614/nagios-integration-for-jira?hosting=server&tab=overview

[Phil Williams]

he problem we have is that we have to use email notifications as we receive alerts from a number of sources, some in house and others client based...

[Phil Williams]

So just to close this off. To get round this problem we have actually deployed PagerDuty now which handles all our notifications and then produces a summary we can inject into the service desk.

It gathers them together nicely as well so avoid having to spam the service desk with multiple notifications.