Incident configurations are used for the alert-sync feature and define what types of alerts will be synced between vROps and ServiceNow. This feature only works on vROps 7.5+ using the built in ServiceNow plugin. It depends on this plugin filter to send initial alerts from vROps to ServiceNow. Once the vROps alert is present in ServiceNow, the ServiceNow Management Pack performs the following additional features:

  • If an alert is cancelled in vROps, the corresponding incident in ServiceNow is closed.
  • If an incident is closed in ServiceNow, the corresponding alert in vROps is suspended. Alerts in vROps are generally triggered automatically by breaching thresholds. Because we cannot control this, if an incident is closed in ServiceNow it should be due to the underlying issue being resolved. Thus, we suspend the Alert in vROps (for a configurable length of time) to allow the alert to resolve. If the threshold(s) is still breached when the alert suspend time has ended, the alert will re-trigger and reopen the ServiceNow Incident.
  • If a vROps alert is triggered on a vROps ResourceKind that is present in one of the resourceTypes sections above, the ServiceNow Management Pack will create a reference from the incident's cmdb_ci column to the CI representing the resource in ServiceNow the alert was triggered on. A resourceType section can be created with empty groupTypes and hierarchies arrays for matching to a resource type, without creating any groupings and hierarchies.
  • The ServiceNow Management Pack can be configured to watch a predefined set of incident columns and display the current values in the corresponding vROps alert as a series of notes.
Important: vROps alerts cannot be closed based on incidents, only suspended.

For more information, see Creating a Configuration File (ServiceNow).