[Answered!] Your Questions from Introduction to Opsgenie

[#1]

Did you know that we hold an introduction to Opsgenie webinar once a month? We give a high-level demo of Opsgenie and then hold a live Q and A.  Since we often have many attendees, we can't get to all the questions live. Whatever we can't answer live we add in a post here in the Community. If you'd like to join us live, you can sign up here. 

Here are all the questions (and answers!) we didn't get to during our Introduction to Opsgenie webinar. 

About the demo and general questions

Can I get a recording of the demo?
After each webinar, we send out a follow up email with a link to the recording. You sign up for future webinars here, and access many resources here

What version of Opsgenie are you using in the demo?
We’re using Opsgenie Enterprise for the demo.

How can I submit a feature request?
You can submit a feature request here: https://support.atlassian.com/opsgenie/

Is there online training/learning for it in Atlassian University?
Yes there are courses available on Opsgenie, you can find them here: https://training.atlassian.com/ Just type Opsgenie in the search box and the pop-up will list the various available courses.

Jira Service Management

What can Opsgenie do that Jira Service Management cannot?
Jira Service Management includes Opsgenie, different features of Opsgenie are included in each Jira Service Management Plan. If you’re using the Jira Service Management Premium plan, you will get all the functionality listed under that plan. Many of these features can be seen in the ITOM category of the pricing table. Jira Service Management offers a rich request portal and acts as a system of record for IT and Development teams. The features of Opsgenie within Jira Service Management offer on-call and alert management, as well as incident response orchestration and incident remediation features. When an incident does occur Opsgenie notifies the right people at the right time via phone call, SMS, mobile push, email, or ChatOps tool.

Does Opsgenie for Jira Service Management come with on-call management? Opsgenie has three Subscription levels--Essentials, Standard, and Enterprise. Which is included with JSM?
All Jira Service Management plans include basic alerting and on-call management from Opsgenie. Different features of Opsgenie are included in each Jira Service Management Plan. If you’re using the Jira Service Management Premium plan, you will get all the functionality listed under that plan.

You can see the full pricing table here: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-management/pricing. 

Where are the lines between Opsgenie standalone and Opsgenie for Jira Service Management?
Opsgenie standalone will provide you with the features listed under the standalone plan that you choose. Jira Service Management Premium offers the most Opsgenie functionality including full incident automation, incident response orchestration, Opsgenie Heartbeats, and Incident Investigation view with CI/CD tools. As of today, the only feature available in Opsgenie standalone that is not available in a Jira Service Management plan, is incoming call routing.

Is it mandatory to create a user in Jira Service Management to enable the Opsgenie integration?
Opsgenie is part of Jira Service Management automatically, you will get whatever Opsgenie features are included in the Jira Service Management plan that you have.

The Opsgenie I have with JSM looks different to this version, are they different?
The Opsgenie features we’re showing during our introduction to Opsgenie demo are part of the Opsgenie standalone Enterprise Plan, these features are available in Jira Service Management Premium. What you see in Opsgenie will also depend on what role you are given. Roles determine the parts of Opsgenie that you have access to.

Can I get the users from a specific Jira project to compile an Opsgenie team ?
This functionality is not currently available, but I’ll pass along the feedback that there’s interest in this feature. 

Can Opsgenie create an Incident in Jira Service Management?
This functionality is not currently available, but a feature request for this has been filed.

Reporting and Analytics

Can you export data from incidents?
This depends on which data you’re looking for. You can export postmortems to confluence (https://docs.opsgenie.com/docs/postmortems). You receive the post incident analysis report, which is also included as an image in the postmortem, and you can use the Incident API to export actual incident details.

Can reports be automated and scheduled to be emailed on a regular basis?
Yes you can do this from Settings-> Reporting and Analytics. You can learn more about that here: https://docs.opsgenie.com/docs/reporting-and-analytics-overview

Can you only start a postmortem if the incident is either resolved or closed?
Yes, the postmortem template becomes available once the incident is resolved or closed. 

Notifications and Alerting 

What is the difference between an alert or an incident? 
An alert can also be referred to as an event or notification. It’s something that you need to pay attention to, but it may not need immediate attention. An incident is a major service disruption or degradation that needs immediate attention, it’s an all-hands on deck situation. Think of it like a tiny fire, if you accidentally catch your dish towel on fire, you can easily put it out in the sink. This is an alert, it needs to be taken care of, but is easily contained. If you catch a whole side of your home on fire, the fire department or fire brigade needs to be called immediately, this is more like an incident. 

Hi, I work for a Gaming Company and we are in the process of building an online gaming portal, mainly Poker. Our Admin panel is on a platform called 'bootstrap' and it interacts with the back-end of the game that is built on Node.js. Can Opsgenie be integrated with our platform and send alerts for certain incidences. We know exactly what we need the alerts for but to what extent is it customizable?
This depends on what you’re using to monitor your services. Opsgenie does not do the monitoring, we aggregate alerts and notify. You would need to set up some sort of application monitoring tool between Opsgenie and your platform. Opsgenie is really customisable in terms of what makes alerts, what doesn’t, setting priorities, etc. 

Can notification rules be applied globally to a team?
Yes they can, by leveraging central notification templates. You can find those here: https://docs.opsgenie.com/docs/central-notification-templates We refer to gloablly as the entire instance and central notification templates are global. You could limit it to a team only by using roles. 

Is it possible to create policies based on different alert combinations?
Yes you can, we call these policies, which can be global or team-based. You can learn more about those here: https://docs.opsgenie.com/docs/policies

I’m on the Standard Plan and I can’t see custom roles?
If you’re on standalone Opsgenie Custom Roles are included with Standard and Enterprise, however only Owners and Admins have access to this information: https://docs.opsgenie.com/docs/users-and-user-roles#custom-roles

Is it possible to configure some action taken to the remote point considering the alert filtering and rules i.e restarting server?
Yes this is possible, by using Custom Actions. You can read more about that here: https://docs.opsgenie.com/docs/custom-actions


Why don’t I see in the menu the option for "Policies" in my Team?
Policies are part of Opsgenie Standard and Enterprise Plans only, and then available to owners and admins. Confirm that you have the right role for access and are using the right plan. Read more here: https://docs.opsgenie.com/docs/global-policies

Is the number of phone numbers limited where alerts come from so that they can be whitelisted on notification devices? In regards to notifications (SMS, Calls) does it matter where in the world the team members are?
Folks will be notified using phone numbers closest to their location. You can see the full-list here: https://docs.opsgenie.com/docs/voice-sms-notifications 

Is it possible to de-duplicate alerts based on the parent/child relationship? For example: When router is offline, I do not want to accept alerts from all devices that are connected to its children.
You would need to deduplicate based on the incoming alert's alias. So a unique value that will aggregate similar alerts.

Can Opsgenie handle 10,000 alerts per day?
Yes it can, provided you are on the right plan. The only limitation is that there are rate limits applied to different plans. 10,000 alerts are not available for the Free Plan for example. 

We use the Opsgenie app. For alerts I only see alerts (and get alarms) of our team. But we see all incidents of all teams. This is the same for all teams. Did we misconfigure or is this "as designed".
This is as designed, just because an incident isn’t assigned to your team, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t in some way affect your team. But you can you can restrict who can see incidents using a custom role:https://docs.opsgenie.com/docs/incident-visibility-and-action-permission#what-about-the-incident-templates. 

What's available in terms of calculating and reporting uptime SLAs?
We have a report called the Service Uptime Report, which I think is what you’re looking for. You can see more here: https://docs.opsgenie.com/docs/infrastructure-health-reports-team. 

On-Call Management

We have complicated roster rotations (various teams, various shifts) can we import rosters weekly (xls) via api?
This is not currently available, but a feature request has been submitted. 

Services

Is there a panel to have a view of the status of business services like pagerduty?
Opsgenie has a Services Health page, which lists the current health of each service. It also integrates with external Statuspages for many companies, like Twilio for example so you can subscribe to those services and keep an eye on their statuses. 

Do related services affect each other ?
At this time service relationships aren’t surfaced in Opsgenie. But there is a feature request filed for this item.

Integrations

Does Opsgenie integrate with Statuspage?
Yes it does, you can see that here: https://docs.opsgenie.com/docs/statuspageio-integration

Does Opsgenie integrate with Gitlab for tracking deployment issues, similar to Bitbucket?
We currently integrate with Bitbucket and Bamboo, and are adding new CI/CD tools. Stay tuned!

Is there a plugin for Zendesk to Opsgenie to trigger an alarm to the on call team?
Yes, Opsgenie has a bi-directional integration with Zendesk, you can read more about that here: https://docs.opsgenie.com/docs/zendesk-integration-v2

How can you integrate Opsgenie with Kapacitor?
You can use the Opsgenie and Kapacitor integration to send Kapacitor events to Opsgenie with detailed information. Opsgenie acts as a dispatcher for Kapacitor events, determines the right people to notify based on on-call schedules and– notifies via email, text messages (SMS), phone calls, and iOS & Android push notifications, and escalating alerts until the alert is acknowledged or closed.You can read all about that here: https://docs.opsgenie.com/docs/kapacitor-integration

I saw something about 'heartbeat' does opsgenie do server monitoring of heartbeats?
Opsgenie heartbeats ensures the connection between Opsgenie and your other tools. To accomplish server monitoring you would need to set up something like a cron job on the server to ping your heartbeat endpoint.

Is it possible to have a document attached to each alarm which describes how it should be handled and certain steps to be taken. Can I build predefined scenarios based on alerts and link a confluence page into it? 

Lots of customers set up runbooks in their alerts. The ideal way is to include a link to an internal KB (like Confluence) outlining those steps. But you could also list the steps in the alert too if you wanted. This would all be set up either in the tool sending the alerts, or at the integration level in Opsgenie. You can't automate attachments out-of-the-box but it's possible in theory with a custom script. You could use global/team policies to look for certain criteria, but a runbook is still probably the best way to do it. 

How does incoming call routing work?
Opsgenie Incoming Call Routing provides a phone number and manages the routing of incoming calls to this phone number based on your on-call preferences. This can be used, for example, as a support call-hotline that routes incoming calls to the right on-call engineers.This page has a video that explains it well: https://docs.opsgenie.com/docs/incoming-call-routing

[LarryBrock]

The presentation moves quick but it's a great intro to the many features and capabilities of Opsgenie.  Kate does a great job of presenting so check this out if you want to see what Opsgenie can do for you!  Thanks @Kate Clavet !!

[Bob Pittman]

Is there a way to set up and receive notifications for critical alerts (P1/P2) when you are not on call or they have not yet been escalated?

[Kate Clavet]

@Bob Pittman Hi Bob! Good question, by design Opsgenie's goal is to help reduce alert noise, and only notify people when absolutely necessary. The use case you're describing isn't part of our out-of-the-box functionality but could possibly be achieved with workarounds. 

Could you elaborate a bit more on why you'd want to notify someone who is not on-call, before the alert has been escalated? 

Our thought is, if the on-call person does not respond within the time limit you provide, the alert will then be escalated, which can be set to immediately for P1/P2 alerts. 

Thanks! 
Kate 

[Jay McCarogher]

We currently have OpsGenie standalone (incoming call routing) and Jira Service Management Premium (for all the automation rule executions) 

I see from the above the we should be entitled to everything standalone does besides "incoming call routing" 

Any idea when this will be given to JSM Premium? We really want to get rid of the stand alone we have and just use it all through Atlassian 

[Armitha Reddy Toorpu Ceema]

Hi Team,

Could you please help me that what specific opsgenie features will get for JSM standard plan.

Thanks,

Armitha.

[Kate Clavet]

Hi @Armitha Reddy Toorpu Ceema thanks for your note :). If you go here: https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-management/pricing and look in the standard column under "Incident and Problem Management" you will see what is included for standard. 

Note that each feature, has more explanation if you click on it. Like you see below, so you can get the granular details. Hope this helps!