Creating tickets in locally hosted JIRA Service Desk with NetCrunch

See how you can configure your NetCrunch to forward alerts and convert them into tickets in the JIRA Service Desk hosted on your local server.

Enable NetCrunch to post tickets to JIRA

To enable NetCrunch to post tickets to your JIRA Service Desk, you need to first set up an Integration Profile for JIRA. To do so, click Monitoring Integration Profiles at the top of the NetCrunch application.

In the Integration Profile editor, the new profile needs to be named and you need to choose the type of JIRA Service Desk you want to integrate with. Two options are available: JIRA Cloud, the Service Desk hosted by Atlassian in their Cloud, or JIRA Local Server, the Service Desk hosted on your own server. This article will focus on the Service Desk hosted on your own server, therefore you need to select JIRA Local Server as an Application Type.

Now enter the DNS Name or IP Address of your server and enter the port number that JIRA has been configured to listen to. Also, the Project Key is needed - it indicates where the NetCrunch tickets should be posted to. You can find the Project Key in JIRA by viewing all Projects and looking at the "Key" column.

Enter the username and the password of the account that will be used to create tickets on behalf of NetCrunch. You can create a new user especially for NetCrunch alerts, but make sure that it has all the permissions needed to raise requests. Also, make sure you enter the correct credentials because if you repeatedly try entering incorrect credentials to access the Service Desk, JIRA will block requests from this user until he proves to be human by logging in with a Captcha request.

Create an alert that sends tickets to JIRA Service Desk

To allow NetCrunch to utilize the integration, it's necessary to create an alerting script (or edit the already existing one). Follow the steps below to create a new alerting script.

• Click Monitoring Alerting Escalation Scripts
• In Alerting Scripts Window click Add Alerting Script
• Click Add and select Action to Run Immediately
• Click Integrations tab and select JIRA Service Desk Ticket

A new window will appear without much to configure. NetCrunch will load the different Request Types that are configured in your Service Desk. The Request Type chosen must contain the following fields: Summary, Description, and Priority, otherwise, the alert cannot be sent properly. For example, create a specific Request Type for NetCrunch alerts in JIRA.

Test creating tickets by clicking Test. A small window with the test procedure will appear, and if everything has been configured properly, the test should finish with a "Successfully executed" message, and a test ticket should now appear in the JIRA Service Desk where NetCrunch should send the messages.

This procedure will not work with the "Comment Ticket" operation. To test the "Comment Ticket" operation, you need to create an alerting script with "Create Ticket" operation as an Action to Run Immediately, and the "Comment Ticket" operation as Action to Run on Alert Close. Then select a node and create an alert (for example Node Monitoring Disabled) to test and assign the alerting script to this alert. The following steps explain how to create a "Node Monitoring Disabled" alert for a single node.

• Right-click the node where you want to create an alert
• Select the Node Settings and click Alerts&Reports in the node settings window
• Click Add Alert, select the Basic tab and choose Node monitoring is disabled
• Right-click the new alert and select Assign Predefined Alerting Script Your Script name

If you now trigger the alert (Disable the node monitoring), you will create a ticket in the Service Desk. If this alert is closed (node monitoring enabled), the JIRA ticket will be commented on. If such an alerting script is attached to various alerts, NetCrunch will send tickets to JIRA each time when the given alert is triggered.

WebHooks (Two-way-integration)

JIRA Service Desk is one of our many two-way-integrations. You can configure a WebHook that sends information back to NetCrunch when the ticket is closed in JIRA so that the alert in NetCrunch is closed as well. This does not resolve the problem which caused the alert, but it will close the alert generated by NetCrunch (i.e. Node is still down even though the alert is closed).

To receive WebHooks from JIRA you need to configure the NetCrunch API Key access. To do so, go to the JIRA Integration Profile and click "Open API Key Manager". Copy the WebHook URL and replace the [Web_Access_address] with your Web access address (i.e. https://123.456.789.0/ncinf/rest...).

Go to JIRA, select the gear icon next to your profile picture and select System. Scroll to advanced and there select WebHooks. Create a new WebHook using the URL with your replaced Web_Access_Address in the field for the URL. To make the WebHook more specific, add [issuetype = "{NetCrunch Alert Type}"] to the "Events" section and tick under Issue the boxes: "updated" and "deleted".

Save this WebHook. Now every time a ticket of NetCrunch with the selected Issue type is closed in JIRA, the respective alert in NetCrunch will be closed as well (the problem still exists, just the alert for this problem is closed).

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