Am I using the right tools for the job?

[Robert _Bobby_ Mittendorf]

The more I try to work with Opsgenie, the less I feel like it's viable for... anything. I'm in the unfortunate position of being the only person at my company with any knowledge at all on the platform, but I have no training on it and I don't have anyone to turn to for guidance. The requirements for this project seem well aligned with what Opsgenie is capable of, but figuring out how to configure the system to meet those requirements has been extremely difficult, so I'm beginning to wonder if we're actually using the wrong tool for the job.

Here's the use case:

• A custom app was developed that sends alerts to Opsgenie via the API
• These alerts contain fairly simple data providing context on potential issues (Source environment, physical location, error details, etc.)
• We take the data from these alerts and pass them to JSM, relying on deduplication to automatically close issues. The majority of the time, these incoming alerts resolve themselves and need no intervention
  • This was one of the first roadblocks, we wanted to have JSM tickets created only after a given alert had been received more than X times (these alerts come in at regular intervals). There was no apparent way to do this without overly complicated workarounds, so we switched to having every alert create a JSM ticket and then leverage SLAs as a more simple workaround
• Using the data passed from Opsgenie to JSM, we should be able to run automations that selectively assign and notify different groups

Now for the current, and potentially final, roadblock. Data that is being passed as extra properties into the Opsgenie API does not seem to be mappable to any particular field in JSM. I cannot find any solid answer on whether or not this can be done or if it's even something that Opsgenie was designed for, but I just need something like the following:

• An alert is created, containing {{extraPropertyX}} and other extra properties, via the API integration
• This alert in turn creates a ticket in JSM, with this data in a specific field, for example the Summary: {{extraPropertyX}} - {{message}}

In reviewing documentation and community questions I can't seem to find a straight answer as to how the above can be accomplished, if at all. On top of that I also don't see any way of passing anything beyond the default custom fields to JSM. It's beginning to feel like a webhook automation in JSM would do a better job.

Is there anyone that can help me with these questions or point me to someone that can? 

[Eugenio Onofre]

Hi @Robert _Bobby_ Mittendorf

Hope you are doing fine.
The extra properties are mapped in a single field in Opsgenie called details. So you would be able to map, for example: {{details}} - {{message}}.

However, this will bring all extra properties in a key-value list.

What I was able to accomplish in one of the projects I handled with Opsgenie was to map all the details in a specific text field in Jira and, from there, create an automation in JSM to split these values and get the only one I wanted using regular expressions.The automation trigger is ISSUE CREATED and the action is to edit the ticket by adding the property identified by the regex to a specific field (could be the summary for example).

About the right tool to do so, I can tell by my experience that Opsgenie is a great and powerful tool for alert management but, if you are not using it for OnCall and teams engagement, in your use case, you could use JSM directly. 

The other roadblock you mentioned about the amount of alerts, this is not possible as the default integration creates a ticket for every single alert received. You would need to handle the counts on JSM side.

Please remember to accept this answer in case it helps you resolve your question as it may also help other community members in the future.

Regards,
Eugenio