Setting Up the Alert Monitor › CA Service Desk Integration

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CA Service Desk Integration

The CA Service Desk Integration feature creates CA Service Desk requests from forwarded alerts and alert trouble tickets, or both.

You can define multiple forwarding destinations to CA Service Desk, with each one pointing to a different CA Service Desk server.

Note: If your CA Service Desk installation is configured with the optional ITIL application, incidents are created instead of requests.

Many CA Technologies mainframe products use this feature to consolidate their problem notification on a specified CA Service Desk server. The feature uses W3C SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) to invoke web services provided by CA Service Desk.

Software Requirements

CA Service Desk Integration has the following software requirements:

How Requests Are Created

To create a CA Service Desk request from an alert, the following internal steps are performed:

  1. The CA Common Services for z/OS CAICCI component is used to pass the request to the CA Common Services for z/OSCAISDI soap component. CAISDI/soap is a z/OS-hosted SOAP client.
  2. CAISDI/soap sets up an IP connection with the CA Service Desk server, then uses HTTP/HTTPS requests to invoke the necessary web services on the CA Service Desk server to create the new request or incident.
  3. The request or incident number is returned and annotated in the alert.

Request Assignment

By default, CA Service Desk requests created by your region appear as assigned requests, with an assignee and an end user of System_NetMaster_User.

Your CA Service Desk administrator can customize the product templates to change these assignments to suit your organization.

Request Updating

A CA Service Desk request created from an alert is static. It reflects the alert details that were current at the time it was created.

Note: A CA Service Desk request is not subsequently updated with any changes to the alert, nor closed when the corresponding alert is closed.

Requests are intended for initial problem notification to a wider and more general data center audience. CA Service Desk Integration complements the functions of the Alert Monitor; it does not replace the Alert Monitor.

Every request (if HTML format is used) contains hyperlinks to various WebCenter pages, including the Alert Monitor. You should use the Alert Monitor for real-time dynamic alerting functions.

For recurring alerts, a request is created for the first occurrence only.

Other Ways to Create Requests or Incidents

In addition to Alert Monitor forwarding and trouble tickets, CA Service Desk requests or incidents can also be created from the following functions:

Operator Console Services

The OCS command SDCREATE can be used to create a CA Service Desk request from the OCS command line, for example:

SDCREATE Problem xxx has occurred

This attempts to open a request on the default CA Service Desk server. The request will have a severity of 4, and a summary and description of Problem xxx has occurred. Like other requests raised, it is assigned to System_NetMaster_User.

Use the SDTEST command to check if a default server is implemented.

MVS Console

As with any product command, you can also issue SDCREATE from the MVS system console, for example:

F rname,SDCREATE Problem xxx has occurred

Request Description Format

By default, your region generates CA Service Desk request description content in HTML format.

By default, CA Service Desk does not render embedded HTML directives in the request description field. To support this, you must customize your CA Service Desk server. This task involves customizing the detail_cr.htmpl form to add keeptags and keeplinks support.

Note: For more information, see the Service Desk Modification Guide.