Accessing custom alarm description in DCE via SOAP

DCIM_Support · ‎2020-07-03

Hi,

We have DCE v7.2.1 and I am in the process of using SOAP to integrate DCE alarms into SCOM 2012 so that we can get SMS' sent when alarms are raised. Not all alarms will need to have SMS' sent so I was thinking I could add a "flag" into the custom description field of a threshold definition to indicate when the SMS is required to be sent.

I can't see this data exposed via SOAP. Does anyone know if this is possible?

It will save a lot of logic having to be put in place in the SCOM environment if it can be done.

Thanks,

Steve

DCIM_Support · ‎2020-07-03

Ron,

The custom description is not available via web services. Depending on what alarms you are trying to pull in the identifier (value you were going to set in the custom description field) for, you could use the Recommended Action field, but this is only available for Device Alarm Configurations within DCE. Any custom thresholds (Threshold Alarm Configurations), including lost communication status thresholds, would not be able to have this value defined for them.

An alternative option, as long as you are not designing this solution for when the email server goes down, would be to use an email-to-text option. For example, if you have Verizon, you could define an email address within an action to be 10digitphonenumber@vtext.com and the email that sends would be converted by the carrier email server to a text message.

Your carrier should be able to provide more details on how to configure email-to-text and what the actual format of the email address needs to be. Please keep in mind there is most likely a character limit as well, so there may need to be a short message email defined as an alarm action, instead of a normal email message that comes through in a table format.

Regards,

Cory

See Answer In Context

DCIM_Support · ‎2020-07-03

Hi ESB Team, thanks for posting! Let's see who can be of assistance here. @community - anyone know if this is possible? Best, Stine

DCIM_Support · ‎2020-07-03

Ron,

The custom description is not available via web services. Depending on what alarms you are trying to pull in the identifier (value you were going to set in the custom description field) for, you could use the Recommended Action field, but this is only available for Device Alarm Configurations within DCE. Any custom thresholds (Threshold Alarm Configurations), including lost communication status thresholds, would not be able to have this value defined for them.

An alternative option, as long as you are not designing this solution for when the email server goes down, would be to use an email-to-text option. For example, if you have Verizon, you could define an email address within an action to be 10digitphonenumber@vtext.com and the email that sends would be converted by the carrier email server to a text message.

Your carrier should be able to provide more details on how to configure email-to-text and what the actual format of the email address needs to be. Please keep in mind there is most likely a character limit as well, so there may need to be a short message email defined as an alarm action, instead of a normal email message that comes through in a table format.

Regards,

Cory

DCIM_Support · ‎2020-07-03

Cory, Thanks for that information. Unfortunately we are setting the system up to not rely on email and are creating custom thresholds. I've found an alternative way to get around the issue though. I created a new device group (which is the only one the account being used by SCOM can see) and added the devices we care about into that group. I then create thresholds that we are interested in getting SMS' for and set them as error or critical severity. The script that runs in SCOM only looks for these severities. This avoids the loss of communication we frequently get since that is a failure severity. The script acknowledges the alarm via SOAP which adds a comment to the alarm so we avoid actioning the same alarms over and over again by checking for the comment on each poll. Regards, Steve

DCIM_Support · ‎2020-07-03

ESB Team, Thank you for commenting with the resolution you found in case anyone else comes across this in the future. Regards, Cory

DCIM_Support · ‎2020-07-03

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