Why stop in one place when you can take a much more satisfying journey? In this era of digital enablement, IT monitoring should not stop at checking the health and availability of services. Today, IT monitoring is the gateway to constantly optimized IT operations. Therefore, many of our clients think of their Centreon IT monitoring platform as a data hub, rather than a terminal. They know they will get more value if they integrate IT infrastructure monitoring with IT operation tools, for streamlined processes, a more immersive experience for IT teams, and improved IT service quality throughout the organization. This blog post provides a quick overview on possible integrations between Centreon’s IT monitoring platform and other ITOps tools.
But first, what IT operation tools are we talking about exactly?
ITOps tools you can integrate with IT monitoring
IT Service Management (ITSM)
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- ITSM tools enable ITOps, in particular infrastructure and operations (I&O) managers, to better support the production environment. Such tools help ensure, as their name entails, the smooth management of tasks and workflows relating to the management and delivery of quality IT service.
- ServiceNow is an example of an ITSM tool that can be integrated with Centreon, among many others.
Incident Response (Event Management / Notifications)
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- Incident response tools are used to define responses to any event that has an impact on service management and performance. Alerts can be generated from the triggering monitoring tool or defined using the event management software.
- PagerDuty is an example of event management software that can be integrated with Centreon, and there are more.
Data Analytics
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- Data analytics software is used to make big data actionable. It indexes and correlates information to make it searchable and to generate alerts, reports, and visualizations.
- Splunk is an example of data analytics software that can be integrated with Centreon, along with other popular data analytics tools.
Why integrate the IT monitoring platform with other ITOps tools?
- Speed up incident resolution.
- Enrich the IT Automation framework using an API-centric approach
- Extend the agility of your teams and improve collaboration
Add stream qualified metrics and events to your data lake to create your own observability stack.
“Our Centreon-based IT monitoring platform is among the most critical assets in our IT department, providing visibility over servers and networks. We notice that the bigger percentage of infrastructure we’re able to monitor, the greater the number of helpdesk tickets originating from an alert in Centreon, rather than from users reporting an issue. End-to-end IT monitoring essentially allows maintaining a consistent user experience.” – Josep A. Pavón, telecommunications and sysadmin engineer at CCMA. Read the full case study.
“Technical support teams benefit from the Centreon platform, relying heavily on the event management feature. When we’re responding on a call, we have instant access to Centreon via Citrix. In addition, the maintenance of the solution is greatly facilitated: no more updating home-made probes thanks to the Centreon Plugin Packs!” – Eric Denizot, Manager, Communication Infrastructure and Projects at Hôpital Nord-Ouest. Read the full case study.
How to integrate a Centreon platform to ITSM, event management or data analytic tools
There are two different paths to integrate a Centreon platform to your ITSM, event management, or data analytic tools. Choose yours by evaluating what your needs are in terms of automation, flexibility, or need for centralized control.
Stream Connectors is your default option and works for all three types of integrations. It automatically filters and enriches Centreon events and metrics to feed the third-party IT Ops platform.
Larger NOCs or SOCs, however, might need to fully control the way incidents are triggered and acknowledged. In such cases, you can use a Centreon Open-Ticket provider to manually manage alert acknowledgement and case creation in a third-party ITSM system.
Here are some examples of integrations and the purpose they serve for some of our clients.
Example 1: Integrating Centreon with ServiceNow
Some organizations use ServiceNow as their main ITSM platform but don’t want to automatically send all events and alerts. Some MSPs, for example, will choose to manually open tickets and then exchange data and trigger events directly within ServiceNow. See how to create ServiceNow tickets within Centreon.
Example 2: Centreon integration with Incident Response platforms
Depending on the size of your organization, you can find tools which allow efficient and simple hotline and alert diffusion management, while maintaining an easy and readable Centreon configuration. Another players in this field we regularly connect to are PagerDuty or Opsgenie, which enable very precise incident assignment and grouping. This allows you to position your Centreon solution within the broader context of SRE processes. A Stream Connector that filters metrics and only sends events will be your integration of choice here.
Example 3: Centreon integration with a data analytics platform
Most organizations combine Centreon with analytics platforms to build their own Observability stack. They will use the Stream Connector dedicated to these platforms and send them all metrics and events. Centreon integrates to platforms such as Graphite, Graylog or Splunk.
Learn more about our seamless integrations.
Not all IT monitoring tools can integrate with ITOps tools – choose wisely!
The Centreon platform provides you with the crucial ability to integrate with other ITOps tools in your stack, and includes many methods and possibilities to achieve this, so you can seamlessly support your organization’s needs and processes. To learn more about Centreon seamless integrations.
Join The Watch to learn about integrations and get help.
Whatever your environment, you can be sure there will be a way to integrate your IT monitoring, and people to help you to do so!
Don’t miss this video interview with Raphaël Chauvel, Chief Product Officer.
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