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This document provides information about integration with IBM Netcool alerting.

IBM Netcool Operations Insight

IBM Netcool Network Management helps communication service providers, enterprise data centers, and networking staff to discover, visualize, detect, configure, activate, integrate, and remediate your network.

Supported features matrix:

Monitoring System Metrics Dashboards Alerting Autoscaling
IBM Netcool ? ? ✓ Yes ?

Legend:

  • Yes - feature supported and implemented
  • No - feature not supported by target monitoring system
  • ? - not investigate
  • - - not applicable

The integration between IBM Netcool and Monitoring Stack can be configured:

  • for Monitoring in Cloud - after deploying Monitoring and doesn't require any updates
  • for monitoring in the VM - during deploy on the VM

Integration with IBM Netcool

This section describes how to configure integration with IBM Netcool for Alertmanager deployed in different places.

Before you begin

  • Find the address of IBM Netcool that provides the webhook integration.
  • Check that Monitoring has access to the address.
  • Check that you have permissions to get, list, create, update, and maybe delete. Custom Resources from the monitoring.coreos.com/v1alpha1 group with kind AlertmanagerConfig (for Alertmanager in the Cloud).
  • Determine which alerts you want to send in IBM Netcool and check that all of them have any specific signs (like labels and part of the name) to specify them in the selector.

Example of necessary permissions:

- apiGroups:
    - "monitoring.coreos.com"
  resources:
    - alertmanagerconfigs
  verbs:
    - 'create'
    - 'delete'
    - 'get'
    - 'list'
    - 'update'
    - 'watch'

Integration Alertmanager in the Cloud

Prometheus can be integrated with IBM Netcool by alerts. It means that Alertmanager, as a part that is deployed with Prometheus, can send alerts to IBM Netcool.

The official documents of IBM Netcool provide information about how to configure it when Prometheus uses various ConfigMaps to store its configurations.

However, in the current solution, prometheus-operator is used to deploy and configure Prometheus and Alertmanager. So this guide describes how to configure the integration using approaches applicable to prometheus-operator.

Configure Monitoring

To configure Monitoring for integration, create an AlertmanagerConfig Custom Resource (CR).

Note: The send_resolved flag should be set to true so that the probe receives resolution events.

  1. Take a template and save it to the file, for example, with the name alertmanager-netcool-webhook.yaml:

    apiVersion: monitoring.coreos.com/v1alpha1
kind: AlertmanagerConfig
metadata:
  name: alertmanager-netcool-webhook
  labels:
    app.kubernetes.io/component: monitoring  # Mandatory label
spec:
  route:
    groupWait: 10s
    groupInterval: 5m
    repeatInterval: 3h
    receiver: 'netcool_probe'
receivers:
- name: 'netcool_probe'
    webhookConfig:
    - url: 'http://<ip_address>:<port>/probe/webhook/prometheus'
      sendResolved: true

  2. Replace <ip_address>:<port> on the address and port for your environment.

  3. Change the group condition as required.
  4. Save the file and create it in Cloud:
kubectl apply -f alertmanager-netcool-webhook.yaml

Prometheus usually takes a couple of minutes to reload the updated configuration and apply the new configuration. 5. Verify that Prometheus events appear on the OMNIbus Event List.

Integration Alertmanager on the VM

To configure Alertmanager on the VM that deployed as a part of External System Monitoring (ESM) for integration, use alertmanager_receivers and alertmanager_route parameters during deployment.

Note: The send_resolved flag should be set to true so that the probe receives resolution events.

  1. Update ESM inventory file used for installation:

    global:
  ...
nodes:
- name: ...
    ...
  role: "monitoring_server"
roles:
  monitoring_server:
    services:
    - alertmanager
services:
  ...
  alertmanager:
    install: true
    ...
    receivers:
    - name: 'netcool_probe'
      webhookConfig:
      - url: 'http://<ip_address>:<port>/probe/webhook/prometheus'
        sendResolved: true
    - name: blackhole
    route:
      continue: false
      receiver: blackhole
      group_wait: 10s
      group_interval: 30s
      repeat_interval: 1h
      routes:
        - continue: true
          matchers:
            - name: "<enable_notification_flag>"
              value: "true"
              matchType: "="
          receiver: netcool_probe

  2. Replace matchers to project specific rules. In this example, <enable_notification_flag> labels what is used by the project to enable notifications for alerts.

  3. Replace <ip_address>:<port> on the address and port for your environment.
  4. Change the group condition as required.
  5. Update inventory file and run update job. Prometheus AlertManager usually takes a couple of minutes to reload the updated configuration and apply the new configuration.
  6. Verify that Prometheus AlertManager events appear on the OMNIbus Event List.

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