1. Manage your alerts on the go!

Are email notifications enough to control your IT infrastructures behavior?  No, not anymore. Email notifications are no longer as effective when there are other channels of communication available; such as phone calls, SMS or iOS & Android push notifications.

IT managers, system administrators, and operations team members receive hundreds of daily email alerts. It's time-consuming to track all alert notifications and focus on emails that matter.  Ignoring emails can become risky since you can miss the important notices. We’ve all been there… right?

What’s the solution? OpsGenie can alert you using different communication channels, including email, phone calls, SMS, iOS & Android push notifications, and Slack & HipChat integrations… which are unavailable with common monitoring tools. Track each issue immediately with OpsGenie’s actionable on-call management platform.

2. Follow-the-sun on-call schedules and rotations.

Easily manage your IT Operations Team workflow through the nights and after hours. Create on-call schedules with multiple rules. Multiple rules help enable different rotations at different times based on a team's geographical location. How does this help you? Now, you can have multi-layer schedules where different people are part of different rotations depending on the time of day or day of the week.

3. Schedule overrides.

During major holidays, when your on-call users are on vacation alert response time becomes unpredictable. But with OpsGenie, your holidays won’t be spoiled! We provide schedule overrides that allow you to define exceptions to the on-call duties for a specified amount of time.

And after the holiday? When the holidays are over, you can shift back to your regular business schedule.

4. Remember: All incidents are not equally urgent.

Incidents vary in urgency; therefore, response time should vary accordingly.  Responding to every issue can result in alert fatigue and slow down incident response time.

With OpsGenie you can configure notification rules and escalate incidents based on their urgency level.  This does not mean that you will lose an alert notification that seemed less important, but you can snooze it for further review. Set up separate workflows for unimportant or minor incidents so they won’t bother you at inappropriate times.

5. Resolve incident faster with smart escalation policies.

Tired of getting called throughout the night about alerts that aren't meant for you?

Benefit from OpsGenie's smart, escalation policies by routing alert notifications as well as calls to the right recipients.  In OpsGenie an individual or a team can be a recipient. Set escalation rules and notify only the on-call users about the incident for faster incident resolution.

Automate your tasks with OpsGenie and collaborate more efficiently across teams in 2017.

The partnership comes as SolarWinds discontinues SolarWinds Alert Central and recommends OpsGenie to its customers as an effective alternative

AUSTIN, Texas – January 4, 2016 –SolarWinds, a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT management software, today announced a strategic partnership with OpsGenie, a leading alerting and on-call management solution for development and operations teams. The partnership comes as SolarWinds discontinues its free alert aggregation tool, SolarWinds® Alert Central.

“When considering the future for SolarWinds Alert Central, we surveyed the market and quickly realized OpsGenie is doing a great job filling the gap we originally identified,” said Mav Turner, senior director, product management, SolarWinds. “While we believe SolarWinds Alert Central was effective at meeting many of our customers’ alert management needs, we want to make sure they have the right long-term solution to solve all of their alerting and on-call management needs, and that’s what OpsGenie will provide them. I’m extremely excited about the benefits the SolarWinds and OpsGenie partnership will provide our customers.”

OpsGenie provides a reliable, flexible and cost-effective incident response solution specifically tailored to SolarWinds customers. With OpsGenie, SolarWinds customers can create customized on-call incident response teams that match their operational structure. OpsGenie also has an efficient and easy-to-apply bi-directional integration with SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor (NPM). This allows OpsGenie to determine the right people to notify based on on-call schedules; dispatch alerts using email, text message (SMS), phone call and iPhone® and Android® push notification; and escalate until an alert is acknowledged or closed.

“OpsGenie is excited to be the Alerting and On-Call Management platform of choice for SolarWinds and its customers,” said Berkay Mollamustafoaglu, chief executive officer, OpsGenie. “We firmly believe that OpsGenie will provide SolarWinds customers the features they need at a price point that makes sense, including a free tier for existing SolarWinds Alert Central users.”

Connect with SolarWinds

• THWACK®
• Twitter®
• Facebook®
• LinkedIn®

About SolarWinds

SolarWinds provides powerful and affordable IT management software to customers worldwide from Fortune 500® enterprises to small businesses, government agencies and educational institutions. We are committed to focusing exclusively on IT Pros, and strive to eliminate the complexity that they have been forced to accept from traditional enterprise software vendors. Regardless of where the IT asset or user sits, SolarWinds delivers products that are easy to find, buy, use, maintain, and scale while providing the power to address all key areas of the infrastructure from on premises to the Cloud. Our solutions are rooted in our deep connection to our user base, which interacts in our THWACK online community to solve problems, share technology and best practices, and directly participate in our product development process. Learn more today at www.solarwinds.com.

About OpsGenie

OpsGenie is an alerting and on-call management solution for development and operations teams. OpsGenie provides the tools needed to design actionable alerts, manage on-call schedules and escalations, and ensure the right people are notified of IT incidents at the right time, using multiple notification methods. Learn more at www.opsgenie.com/solarwinds-alert-central.

SolarWinds, SolarWinds & Design, Orion, and THWACK are the exclusive property of SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC or its affiliates, are registered with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and may be registered or pending registration in other countries. All other SolarWinds trademarks, service marks, and logos may be common law marks or are registered or pending registration. All other trademarks mentioned herein are used for identification purposes only and are trademarks of (and may be registered trademarks) of their respective companies.

© 2016 SolarWinds Worldwide, LLC. All rights reserved.

Monitoring is an important part of DevOps. You need to monitor; your servers, containers, and now your serverless functions. Function as a Service (FaaS), also called “Serverless” architecture, is a relatively new concept. AWS Lambda is by far the most popular FaaS/Serverless solution in the market. It is an event driven, serverless computing service.

AWS Lambda eliminates most of the problems you experience when you manage your own servers such as:

• Scaling
• Capacity utilization
• Operation system-language updates
• Metrics or logging

In this blog, we will highlight the logging aspect of AWS Lambda service on a high level.

AWS Lambda uses AWS CloudWatch for logging purposes. All log statements or exceptions

that your functions throw are written to AWS CloudWatch. On CloudWatch, you can create

a metric alarm which can send an SNS message whenever the metric value reaches the

threshold you defined.

For AWS Lambda, there are four types of metrics; Invocations, Errors, Duration, and

Throttles. You can find more information about Lambda metric alarms here.

In this blog, we will focus on “error” metrics, which is triggered by events such as:

• Handled exceptions (e.g., context.fail(error))
• Unhandled exceptions causing the code to exit
• Out of memory exceptions
• Timeouts
• Permissions errors

Now, let’s see what problems we face at OpsGenie when monitoring our own Lambda

functions.

Of course, the goal is to get notified with actionable information whenever an error occurs in

the Lambda functions, which are monitored as carefully as our servers. However, when

monitoring our Lambda functions we faced the following issues:

Issue 1: Creation of necessary alarms. When you create a new Lambda function, no alarms

are generated by default. We needed a way to create alarms automatically with the right

metrics.

Issue 2: No actionable data. When an “error” metric alarm is triggered, a message is sent to

an SNS topic. If you use CloudWatch to get the data sent to you in the SNS message, this

does not help since there is not enough explanation on the exception’s root cause. We only

get the alarm’s name, description, state history, and metric information from these

messages. There is no indication of the real problem, although it exists in the logs.

Here are common solutions to the problems, which are satisfying, but we

decided not to use them:

For Issue 1:

a) The creation of CloudWatch Alarms can be done with the deployment of our Lambda function. When we upload the function to AWS, we can create the necessary alarms; however, to reduce the complexity of the codebase we decided to take this out of the deployment processes.  

b) Another solution can be to use AWS CloudTrail service which writes API calls to AWS Lambda functions to Amazon S3. We would need to listen to logs from S3, parse and act accordingly at that point. This approach is feasible if in the future, we can get related CloudTrail logs in AWS Lambda. But now it seems unnecessary.

For Issue 2:

a)  One way to solve the issue is to use our CloudWatch integration.  Although, with this solution we need to see the related logs that could help developers see the real reason behind the problem.

b)  Another alternative is to create a Lambda function that can query our Lambda functions logs and create an alert if it encounters an error pattern. This function can be executed periodically by using CloudWatch Events - Schedule trigger. Unfortunately, this solution has performance problems as it queries all logs and has the tendency to create redundant alerts or miss the real problems as it only looks for patterns within the logs.

OpsGenie solution to monitor Lambda functions

As stated earlier, here are the two new Lambda functions that we implemented to account for these issues. OpsGenie runs two lambda functions together! Illustrated below are the main building blocks to these problems along with code samples. (The code will be in Java, but it should be a straightforward approach to implement all these in other Lambda supported languages).

Two Lambda functions to automate monitoring and alerting:

1. “CreateLambdaCloudWatchAlarm” function: A lambda function which periodically creates/updates CloudWatch Alarms.
2. “MonitorCloudWatchLambdaErrors” function: A lambda function that receives messages from an SNS topic when a CloudWatch Alarm threshold is reached. It then creates an alert in OpsGenie with the related data.

Before writing the real functions

Create necessary IAM roles for each function. (Note that you may need to add additional

actions if you use other services like S3 to get secret keys).

1. Create an SNS topic named “lambdaAlarm”
2. Create “CreateLambdaCloudWatchAlarm” function’s IAM role
3. Create “MonitorCloudWatchLambdaErrors” function’s IAM role

CreateLambdaCloudWatchAlarm function

Metric Alarms.This function creates/updates CloudWatch alarms for all Lambda functions for every X minute(s). Alarms for these Lambda functions are configured to send an SNS message to lambdaAlarm topic if Errors > 0 for 60 seconds.

What is the benefit of this function? You no longer have to create your alarms manually. Yeah! 

The limitation of this function is that as it is executed periodically; your newly created

 functions may not have CloudWatch alarms created immediately. So to create the alarms, you may decrease the interval or trigger the function manually.

Important:

• After deploying the code, automatically or manually, you need to create a CloudWatch Events trigger so that your Lambda function can be triggered automatically. For example, you can execute this function every 30 minutes by using the CloudWatch Events Trigger.
• We use an “snsClient” to get lambdaAlarm topic’s Amazon Resource Name (ARN). Topic’s ARN will be used as an action point for Alarm actions, meaning that the CloudWatch will send a message to this topic by using the ARN.
• We use lambdaClient to receive all lambda function descriptions so that we can use the function’s names as value for functionName dimension. Function name dimension is used to create CloudWatch alarms specifically for the given function name.
• We use cloudWatchClient to create metric alarms. This is its real job.

Sample code CreateLambdaCloudWatchAlarm function

This is what automatically created CloudWatch alarms will look like:

MonitorCloudWatchLambdaErrors function

This function receives events from lambdaAlarm SNS topic. In this SNSEvent object, we have all the necessary data to create an explanatory alert in OpsGenie. Additional log data helps developers see what occurs before going into the log details in CloudWatch. It will automatically retrieved data from the logs and add as details to the alert.

Automatically retrieved logs are very important as they will provide a quick overview of the error’s reason for the alert.

Important

• After deploying code, automatically or manually, you need to add an SNS event trigger to your lambda function (add a subscription to lambdaAlarm topic).
• The received SNSEvent object’s data is placed into message fields as String. So, we parse it to an object called SnsMessage to operate smoothly on the data.
• We have the Lambda function’s name in the SnsMessage object’s dimensions field. We extract this data to find the log group name (“/aws/lambda/” + lambdaFunctionName) for CloudWatch Logs.
• We use awsLogClient to query related Lambda function’s logs. To get the related logs, they are filtered based on the error pattern and time: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/logs/FilterAndPatternSyntax.html.
• All SnsMessage’s and retrieved logs are added to the OpsGenie alert details as key-value pairs.
• Alias fields are used to set-up an Alias with the Lambda function’s name to avoid duplicate alerts in OpsGenie.

Sample code MonitorCloudWatchLambdaErrors function

Great Improvements!

• You may also receive SNS notifications if the CloudWatch alarm state turns into INSUFFICIENT_DATA or OK states. By using this value if an alarm’s status was ALARM and now OK or INSUFFICIENT_DATA, you may choose to close the alert by using the alert’s alias. This will allow you to auto-close alerts in OpsGenie.
• But again, if ALARM messages keep appearing and you do not close the alert, new alerts will not be created in OpsGenie. Instead, the “count field” of the same alert will be increased.
• If you operate in multiple regions, pass region name as an argument to CreateLambdaCloudWatchAlarm function. You can also get the current regions name from invoking the function’s ARN.
• Automate the deployments of Lambda functions and its triggers.

  ---

Note: The shared code is only for demonstration purposes and should not be used in production as is.

We are happy to answer any questions you may have! Contact us here!

Last week we were proud to announce a strategic partnership with Solarwinds!  As SolarWinds announced the End-of-Life of their Alert Central (AC) product, they found OpsGenie to be the best alerting and On-Call (incident) management platform on the market to recommend to their customers.OpsGenie was enthusiastically ready to make this transition as smooth as possible.

What to do if you are an Alert Central user?

Incident Management tools can be expensive and if you weren't planning on replacing your Alert Management solution, OpsGenie can help. OpsGenie is offering unique plans for existing SolarWinds and Alert Central users.

Take a peek at what OpsGenie can do for you below!

Why OpsGenie?

OpsGenie is a leading alerting, on-call management, and incident orchestration platform for development and operations teams. SolarWinds believes that OpsGenie can provide Alert Central users with a more robust, flexible, and complete Alerting and On-Call management solution.

What Alert Central Users will gain?

Of course Alert Central could meet your everyday alerting expectations, but with OpsGenie you gain 360 visibility of your entire IT infrastructure and benefit from:

• More actionable alerts based on incident urgency level
• On-Call Schedules, Rotations, and Overrides with Who is On-Call capability
• Smart Escalation policies to route alerts to the right people
• Multi-team collaboration for faster incident resolution
• Multiple Communication Channels, including e-mail, calls, SMS, push notifications, HipChat and Slack integrations
• 100+ integrations with industry leader IT services including SolarWinds NPM

What OpsGenie Plans are available for SolarWinds Customers?

With the partnership, OpsGenie will offer two special plans for SolarWinds Alert Central Customers: Free Lite and Pro Plans, which offer features matching SolarWinds Alert Central and beyond.

However, additional OpsGenie pricing plans are available should Alert Central Users choose to expand their Alerting and Incident management needs beyond the standard SolarWinds Alert Central capabilities.

If you would like to learn more about Alert Central's transition to OpsGenie, sit in on our webinar dedicated to the Solarwinds and OpsGenie partnership on January 18th at 2pm (EST). Register now!

Click here for more information.

As opposed to the traditional software business, the modernday software business is platform-based, which empowers integration with a widening world of products and services. Thus enabling new business ecosystems. The resulting ecosystems enable results and achievements that are way more effective and capable compared to individual product offerings. In this new software world, companies co-evolve their capabilities, cooperate to support consumer needs at every stage, eventually conceiving the next big innovations of technology.

In this blog, we’ll examine one such ecosystem focused on team collaboration, Atlassian! We, at OpsGenie, love working with Atlassian as we consistently use their products for our internal communication, collaboration and for project management purposes. We have huge respect for their vision and achievements, and we’re amazed to see how successful they have been in creating a marvelous fusion between their products. You realize the power of their ecosystem when you integrate HipChat with JIRA, Bitbucket and Confluence, and experience the power of automation and increased visibility.

Supporting the software ecosystems and integrations is at heart and having been part of this culture, in this blog, we would like to showcase how the Atlassian product family along with OpsGenie can be used to build an even more powerful collaborative synergy. Typically used for IT Operations Management, OpsGenie together with the Atlassian product suite can be used to manage and resolve incidents faster and more effectively. Here are a few steps we can recommend that you can take to help make your job easier with faster incident resolution:

Step 1: Adopt ChatOps Culture

Chat-driven incident resolution aims to unify all of the users’ tools, workflows, and processes into a single chatroom. With the increased transparency and information flow, teams can verify whether an incident is being handled appropriately, while capturing the details of the resolution process in a central location. Learn more about OpsGenie for ChatOps.

Step 2: Integrate your monitoring services with OpsGenie

Whether you use Datadog, New Relic or SolarWinds for monitoring, you can integrate your tools with OpsGenie. When an incident occurs, OpsGenie alerts will be automatically created and you will be notified with reliable OpsGenie notification mechanisms. Additionally, OpsGenie will orchestrate everything you need to do to communicate and resolve the issue quickly. How? Keep reading…

Step 3: Integrate OpsGenie with JIRA (or JIRA Service Desk)

Let OpsGenie automate the ticketing! When an incident occurs, since you set-up an OpsGenie alert for that incident (thanks to Step 2), the OpsGenie alert can check if there is a related JIRA issue. If there is no related JIRA issue, OpsGenie can create one automatically using the alert details. If there is an established issue for that incident, OpsGenie can add the alert details as “comments” to the JIRA case automatically. Read more… 

Step 4: Build a Status Page

Lately, it has become common practice to provide a web-based “status page” that contains up to date information about the health of services, incidents, in addition to what the service providers are doing to resolve the issues. This is a nice and centralized way of communicating your issues and keeping your users up-to-date and in the know. Through Opsgenie, you can build status pages for your services and update them with all the details automatically. Want to learn more?

Step 5: Get a HipChat Room!

HipChat is at the heart of Atlassian ChatOps. When an incident arises, as the OpsGenie alert is created, OpsGenie can create a HipChat room for the affected service automatically. Your team can communicate the problem and resolve right in HipChat. Since OpsGenie has bi-directional integration with HipChat, your team can see the incident details within HipChat, and they can run actions to resolve the issue directly within the chat room using OpsGenie’s custom action capabilities. Want to learn how to unlock?

Step 6: Build a Runbook

Runbooks can help your team solve problems faster by guiding them on what to do in case when a specific incident occurs. Atlassian Confluence is a perfect fit to build your runbooks and centralize them for your team’s access whenever needed. OpsGenie can create a Confluence page for your affected service(s) automatically and attach the resolutions details discussed in HipChat and JIRA case as “notes”.

Want to learn more? Unlock the power of Atlassian and OpsGenie by visiting our NEW Atlassian integration page. Also do not miss our workshops for OpsGenie integrations with HipChat, JIRA - JIRA Service Desk and StatusPage as well!

Slack is great!

It is not just a messaging app; it is so much more with its apps. OpsGenie’s integration with Slack is so thorough that it has become a top app in the Slack app directory!

OpsGenie's Slack app has built-in slash commands, which is an efficient way to execute actions on a channel. For example, you have the option to create an OpsGenie alert in a channel by typing a command like /genie alert [alert message] for [user team]. Slash commands are very powerful and cover the majority of the use-cases. However, there may be more you want to do in your Slack channel.

Our customers began with asking how they can create alerts from messages sent to a Slack channel. OpsGenie is flexible. What you can do with our API and client SDK’s are close to limitless! Slack also provides  great solutions for such use-cases.

We created a sample application to show how you can do this easily. For these kinds of custom solutions, we prefer to use AWS Lambda to eliminate operational costs.  In this solution, we also needed an https endpoint, so we used AWS API Gateway service as well.

Outgoing webhooks are used to get data out of Slack in real time. Basically, Slack sends the messages to our API Gateway endpoint, and we create an alert in OpsGenie by using our Node.js SDK to keep the code simple.

Before sharing the code and setup details, we should point out that this is a very simple integration and it creates an alert in OpsGenie for each message sent to the specified channel. However, let’s say you need more than that and you want to create alerts for the Slack messages that contain “alert” text.

To create alerts from Slack messages you have two options:

• Define a trigger_word in the Outgoing webhook. In this case, Slack will only post the messages that contain “alert” text.
• Update the code we share with you. You can filter the messages based on its content, add additional data to your messages, or get additional information from an external service to enrich your alerts.

Although this script is straightforward and short, it represents a powerful concept. You can create custom solutions by using our APIs and client SDKs along with AWS services without having to worry about implementation details, how to manage your servers, or how to deploy your applications. We have also used serverless.js to provision our application. Creating and updating your Lambda function or creating your API Getaway trigger could be tricky. Yet, Serverless.js makes it simpler and easier.

To setup and use this integration, you can visit our GitHub repository and follow the steps described in the README file. For creating a full-featured Slack app with incoming webhooks or events APIs, you might want to take a look at John Agan’s repository. It truly does a lot for you!

If you have any questions about the implementation, you are welcome to contact us!

Just don’t forget to play with the code to make it more powerful!

New Customers Yahoo, HubSpot, Overstock Sign On and Fuel Company’s Momentum; AppDynamics Chairman Jyoti Bansal Joins as an Advisor, and Google Executive Izzy Azeri Joins the Board.

Falls Church, VA – January 25, 2017 –OpsGenie, a leading alerting and on-call management platform for engineering and operations teams, today announced record growth for 2016 and new strategic advisors for the company.

OpsGenie has tripled its annual recurring revenue while doubling the number of customers to over 2,000, including recent customer additions Yahoo, HubSpot, SolarWinds, Glassdoor, and Overstock. OpsGenie also opened a new sales office in Boston, MA and tripled employee headcount. This news comes on the heels of the company’s recent strategic partnership with SolarWinds, which chose OpsGenie as the company’s preferred on-call management solution.

“I’m excited about the growth we had in 2016,” said OpsGenie CEO Berkay Mollamustafaoglu. “We have not only grown our customer base and revenue but managed to build an outstanding team as well. We're well positioned to execute on our plans to deliver additional products and capabilities to enable our customers to cope with increasingly complex operational challenges.”

OpsGenie also announced the addition of two tech-industry veterans, Izzy Azeri and Jyoti Bansal, as investors to the company. Bansal, the former CEO and current chairman of AppDynamics, is advising the company with strategy and operations, while Azeri, a co-founder of Stackdriver, which was acquired by Google, has joined OpsGenie’s board. “I’m excited to be part of the OpsGenie team and their overall growth. 2017 is poised to be another great year for the team,” Azeri said.

About OpsGenie

OpsGenie is an alerting and on-call management solution for development and operations teams. OpsGenie provides the tools needed to design actionable alerts, manage on-call schedules and escalations, and ensure the right people are notified of IT incidents at the right time using multiple notification methods. Learn more at www.opsgenie.com.

Media Contact:

Nadia Mehra

571-748-7000

Nadia@OpsGenie.com

You spend time creating your OpsGenie configuration, so it’s now crucial to ensure that your account configuration is safe and reproducible just in case something goes wrong.

Git is a distributed version control system that records changes to a file or set of files over time. This allows tracking changes to each file and recalling a specific version later. It’s primarily used by developers as a source code management system; however, it can and should be utilized in Operations, too. Git is efficient for not just code, but also for all kinds of alternative files such as configuration files.

Earlier, OpsGenie introduced the new “OpsGenie Configuration Management Tool.” This tool uses OpsGenie Java SDK to export OpsGenie configurations as JSON files enabling customers to take advantage of Git to manage the configuration data. Got that? The tool also supports restoring configurations, which means that it not only tracks configuration changes, but also reverts to a previous configuration if needed.

Performing configuration backup and restore on AWS CodeCommit

In this blog post, we examine how to effectively export your OpsGenie configuration using the OpsGenie Configuration Management Tool; and how to manage this data in AWS CodeCommit, a fully managed Git-based version control service. We will illustrate  what a typical workflow looks like as well as how we ensure that you can safely backup and restore your configurations.

Backup your operational configurations

Follow the instructions below to backup your operational configurations:

Step 1:

Download the OpsGenie Configuration Management Tool which consists of two executable JAR files. The first is for backup purposes and saves your OpsGenie account’s configurations to JSON files. The second JAR is for restore purposes and loads backed up configurations to OpsGenie. Click here to learn more about this tool.

Step 2:

For OpsGenie Configuration Management Tool to work properly, first you need to grant access to your OpsGenie Account via your integration's API Key. To view your API Key: After logging into OpsGenie, go to the “Integrations” page and copy the API Key by clicking the “copy” button.Step 3:

Configure your Git client to communicate with AWS CodeCommit to use it as the source control repository.

For details on how to create a repository on AWS CodeCommit, click here.

For details on how to setup your configuration to communicate with AWS CodeCommit repository, click here.

Step 4:

Now you can run JAR packaged applications with the Java launcher (Java command). To backup your OpsGenie configurations, you can use this command:

java -jar OpsGenieBackupExecutable.jar <API_Key> <SSHURI> <SSHKeyPath>

API_KEY:         OpsGenie API key.

SSHURI:         SSH URI of the repository which OpsGenie configuration files will be pushed.

SSHKeyPath:  Path of the SSH file which is storing the SSH key.

This command clones the remote repository into a directory called, “OpsGenieBackupGitRepository” in your running path. After the cloning process, the export jar backs up the data to this directory under a folder titled, “OpsGenieBackups”.

At the end of the backup operation, the tool pushes your OpsGenieBackups folder to the AWS remote repository. This way you can ensure that your OpsGenie configurations are safely stored on a remote repository over AWS CodeCommit.

Restore your operational configurations

Follow the instructions below to restore your operational configurations in OpsGenie:

Step 1:

You have already downloaded OpsGenie restore JAR file. Now you can use it to restore your backed up configuration to your OpsGenie account:

java -jar OpsGenieRestoreExecutable.jar <API_Key> <SSHURI> <SSHKeyPath>

API_KEY:         OpsGenie API key.

SSHURI:         SSH URI of the repository which OpsGenie configuration files will be pushed.

SSHKeyPath:  Path of the SSH file which is storing the SSH key.

This command clones the remote repository into a directory called OpsGenieBackupGitRepository in your running path. After the cloning process it restores the data in the OpsGenieBackups folder to your OpsGenie account.

We are happy to answer any further questions. Please contact us here.

A few months back we held a webinar in conjunction with Logentries where we demonstrated “2 Use Cases for Using Logs in Incident Management.” Watch it now here. In the webinar we examined traditional log management and IT alerting tools integrations along with the future of incident management with enriched alerts. Now if you’re already an OpsGenie or Logentries user or using monitoring and collaboration systems, like New Relic or Slack, this blog post might be of some interest to you. You will learn about improving your alert notification processes and incident response times.

WHY IS INCIDENT RESPONSE IMPORTANT?

According to a recent report by Stephen Elliot of IDC, the average cost of a critical application failure is $500,000 to $1 million per hour for a fortune 100 company. Wow! On average that ends up costing these companies about $1.25 billion to $2.5 billion a year. Back in August 2016, Delta Airlines had a 5-hour computer outage, which cost them $150 million. These outages are extremely costly and can damage your company’s brand reputation. It is imperative to prevent and respond to such incidents as quickly as possible to guarantee the further success of every organization.

TRADITIONAL LOG MANAGEMENT AND IT ALERTING TOOLS

When an issue arises, anomalous log data triggers an individual or team for further investigation and remediation. OpsGenie integrates seamlessly with over 100 different monitoring and incident management systems, such as SolarWinds, New Relic, Atlassian and DataDog. These tools check the health and availability performance of applications, servers, networks, as well as ticketing and collaboration tools where reported incidents should be acknowledged as fast as possible. Log Management tools are also among OpsGenie’s primary integrations, such as Logentries, which works with huge data and can identify where problems arise.

OPSGENIE + LOGENTRIES = IMPROVE INCIDENT RESPONSE TIME

Integrating Logentries and OpsGenie creates the ideal solution for both incident identification and response. When an alert comes to OpsGenie from the Logentries Integration, you can design actionable alerts by using default or custom fields and the more thoroughly you design the content of your alerts, the easier it will be to comprehend and the more optimal the steps to solve each issue will be, ultimately reducing time spent researching the alert.

USING LOG DATA TO ENRICH ALERTS: SITUATIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Using log data in incident response offers you a 360° view to everything happening in your IT environment. It improves situational intelligence, a new approach to using log data to enrich alerts from monitoring systems and key components of your infrastructure to shorten the time to identify and correct issues.

In the past, Dev and Ops teams spent excessive time fixing things manually to keep the system up. Now that DevOps processes and tools have matured, many automated features have been released. Automation is an indispensable part of DevOps, and according to the data provided by IDC’s Fortune 100 Survey, 60% of respondents indicate Automation as the highest demand initiative they are looking to implement.

Logentries has a rich set of APIs to review logs, analyze them, set different usage or tags, export, or interact with log data. Try OpsGenie to test the integration with Logentries.

HOW INTEGRATION WITH LOGENTRIES TECHNICALLY WORKS

OpsGenie gives high importance to incident response; we try to understand by standing in our customer's’ shoes. That’s why we care about the types of alerts they receive and how our customer’s react and deal with certain alerts. When you get an alert, the first thing you do is assess what kind of alert it is. Is it urgent? What caused it? Does it need to be escalated or can it wait until morning?

To manage all of these actions, you have to thoroughly review the logs. OpsGenie helps reduce the time spent looking at logs while helping users quickly figure out these issues.

That’s why OpsGenie implemented a layer using AWS Lambda which helps us to run code on the cloud. This is a perfect solution for SaaS. When an alert is created and matches the predefined criteria, it triggers a webhook request, outbound HTTPS request, and it triggers a code in Lambda through API gateway. Through this Lambda script, we can access all alert data, whether it was from Logentries or other sources. The key value here is that you can use Logentries to understand where the alert was generated. Lambda script has access to all alert data and with that data, we can perform relevant queries through the REST API and create HTML, or other extension files, and attach it back to OpsGenie.

OpsGenie and Logentries have produced a proof of concept integration that provides situational awareness by using the Logentries Query API to automatically query for log data in response to an alert received by OpsGenie. With this new integration, we are automating the investigation process involved in responding to an incident.

To get a deeper understanding on how to use Logs in Incident Response, watch our webinar here.

We at OpsGenie continuously work hard to add new capabilities to our product.  We are proud to announce a new resource that will help alleviate daily stress: Mass Notifications!

What is OpsGenie’s Mass Notification Solution?

OpsGenie’s Mass Notification system provides OpsGenie users the ability to send notifications to individuals inside and outside of their organization. For instance, you may want to communicate urgent messages and/or incidents instantaneously with people who are not OpsGenie users. These people could be your company’s stakeholders (boss, partners, users of your products, etc.) or individuals who may potentially be impacted by an event such as a critical system outage. The Mass Notification system allows you to plan and manage such communication and responses. This solution grants you the ability to notify anyone, anywhere, on any device before, during, or after the event.

How does it work?

It’s easy! To send or create mass notifications through OpsGenie; first, you need to define the event that requires the communication, then identify the recipients of the mass notification messages and finally the criteria that associates whom to notify, through which channel, and of which event.

There are two ways to fire a mass notification in OpsGenie:

• Manually -- Create a mass notification event in OpsGenie, then define the Recipients and notification methods for your event.
• Automated --  Create mass notification events by pre-configuring templates and scenarios. In this case, integrate the Mass Notification system with OpsGenie’s alert management system, and thus, authorizing hundreds of monitoring, ticketing, and collaboration services. Using this method, a mass notification event is created automatically from an OpsGenie alert based on the criteria that triggers a specific mass notification event. With that, the defined recipients will be notified immediately.  

Both of these methods can notify thousands of people instantly. In both cases, you can define the mass notifications recipients either manually or by uploading the recipient lists.

With OpsGenie’s Mass Notification system you will benefit from the:

• Ability to notify anyone, anywhere, on any device, for urgent events. Recipients do not need to be OpsGenie users to receive notifications from us!
• Fully customizable and pre-configurable notifications.
• Configurable targeting based on criteria such as location or user profile.
• Integration with hundreds of monitoring, ticketing and collaboration services! Any alerts generated by those services can be configured to trigger mass notifications automatically.
• Ability to automatically create recipient profiles by uploading user data from other systems.

Start your free trial of OpsGenie and the Mass Notification system now! Questions? Do not hesitate to contact our Support team!

Recently OpsGenie hosted a joint webinar with Signal Sciences, where Berkay Mollamustafaoglu, OpsGenie Co-Founder and CEO and Zane Lackey, Founder/CSO, Signal Sciences Corp, discussed how to secure your web applications using OpsGenie and Signal Sciences.

Watch the webinar now!

It is possible to win the war against cyber attacks by combining incident response orchestration and threat detection systems, i.e. integrating OpsGenie with Signal Sciences. Detecting cyber threats and alerting is not enough, it is imperative to have an alert classification system, in order to understand which alert is worth taking actions and that the appropriate people are involved in the incident resolution process.

Threat detection is not only important for Security Operations, but also for Development, System Administration and all other departments within an organization to solve performance or security issues while responding to them as fast as possible. Multiple participants are needed to solve any anomalous event and its quick execution depends on the content of the incident.

Fighting Alert Fatigue

Security issues were blockers not that long ago. Signal Sciences’ goal was to focus on empowering teams with security visibility within the entire organization and champion everyone to understand security data and issues. With the OpsGenie and Signal Sciences integration, it becomes possible to not only understand security alerts, but also classify them with severity levels without digging through thousands of log messages and sorting out the false positives from the real alerts.

Not all alerts are urgent and require a response, some of them are just warnings or informational. OpsGenie provides the opportunity to effectively classify alerts using different tags to differentiate critical or urgent alerts from those which have a minor impact on your IT infrastructure.

With the OpsGenie and Signal Sciences integration you can define response criteria for your security alerts. Do you need to notify people immediately, who to notify, when and in which order? If you try to respond all alerts the same way you will certainly miss lots of other, more crucial ones.

With OpsGenie you are able to respond to alerts in real time based on the content and urgency level without having to mine the relevant data in the logs.

How Signal Sciences and OpsGenie work together

Not all alerts reported are major incidents. With this integration you can configure Signal Sciences alerts in OpsGenie so that when Signal Sciences detects an anomaly in your system, an informative alert can be sent from Signal Sciences to OpsGenie explaining the nature of the alert. The urgency to respond to the alert depends on the state of it, i.e on the escalation policies, on-call schedules and severity tags you defined within Opsgenie. Based on these, you can acknowledge, close or respond to an alert as needed.

With the possibility to classify alerts you will stay away from the dreaded alert fatigue illness while  supporting your experts on the alerts that matter. With OpsGenie’s “Teams” organization, you will be able to involve the right people from different teams to quicken the incident response time. Hence, you will never miss critical alerts

Benefits of Signal Sciences and OpsGenie Integration

• Decreased MTTA and MTTR
• Time-wise escalation policies by notifying only the people and teams on-call
• No (minor) impact on web application security incidents
• Single visibility to security incident resolution
• Involving the right people at the right layer

OpsGenie’s key concept is to let you design actionable alerts where alert response is a part of alert. Integrate OpsGenie with Signal Sciences now and protect your web applications from security threats.

Hi, I’m Serhat from OpsGenie. I recently had the chance to go to Atlassian’s Connect Week event. I will try to share my experience at this amazing event.

I arrived in Amsterdam on Saturday afternoon and had the chance to visit lots of great places like the Van Gogh museum, the Rijksmuseum, the Heineken Experience…

On Monday morning, I went to Atlassian’s Amsterdam office at around 9:00 AM. There were many friendly people at the door who greeted me. I introduced myself and got my Atlassian Connect Week event t-shirt; then I went to the meeting area, where we had standup meetings throughout the week.

Luke Kilpatrick from Atlassian welcomed us, and everyone started introducing himself/herself. After the introductions, there were presentations about JIRA, Confluence, JIRA Service Desk, and others. I learned a lot about Atlassian products on Monday. At the end of the day, there was a happy hour event where I met great guys from all over the world. We talked about lots of things, including what our companies do and what our plans were for the week…

I will not go into the implementation details, but during the Connect week, I mainly worked on our HipChat Add-On updates together with Nick Turskyi from HipChat. On Tuesday, I completed one of our prime goals of providing an option to simplify HipChat messages that go into the room. Now, our messages are collapsible and don’t take so much space in the chat room, but they still show all the details when you extend the message or click the message to see all the details in the sidebar. It’s been implemented in a backward compatible way so that current customers who love the way it was can still use it the same way.

Wednesday started with a standup meeting where everyone said what they were working on and shared  any problems they encountered. During the day, I scheduled meetings with JIRA, JIRA Service Desk and Confluence teams. There were lots of useful ideas on how to improve our current applications and add new ones to provide a complete workflow using Atlassian tools.

I added an unacknowledge action option to the HipChat sidebar. Now, users can unacknowledge their alerts -- in addition to acknowledging and closing them -- without leaving the HipChat room.

At the end of the day, Atlassian organized a trip to the Amsterdam Museum. It was a great trip, and we learned a lot about Amsterdam. After the trip, there was another happy hour next to the museum. After all that, we felt a bit hungry and decided to explore Indonesian food at Kantjil.

On Thursday, I had a meeting with a UI/UX team and got feedback on our HipChat Add-On. I implemented action buttons for the alert list view in the chat sidebar that makes executing actions faster. I also worked on implementing an add note action option, using HipChat dialogs. It was nearly done, but it could not be released (because of a bug). Thursday was intensive, because the next day would be our demo day!

Friday was our demo day, and I had the chance to present information about our product and about what I accomplished during the week. Many great companies shared their products and proved the strength of the Atlassian platform.

It was truly a great week in Amsterdam!

I met with developers from all over the world, learned a lot about their products, exchanged ideas, explored Amsterdam, and developed great Atlassian add-ons.

Take a look, below, at some of my other pictures from this wonderful week. Oh: special thanks to Michael Lauricella from Atlassian, Nick Turskyi from HipChat, Hector Urtubia and Matt Pizzimenti from Olark, Nic from Fugue, and Brandon from PingPilot. This week would not have been as great without you guys!

Falls Church, VA – March 27, 2017 – OpsGenie announced today at the MSPWorld 2017 Conference in New Orleans, the release of its new Managed Service Provider (MSP) solution to allow MSPs to extend sophisticated incident response management services to their customers.

OpsGenie is an incident response management platform, and the new solution introduces a plan that offers OpsGenie to MSP customers as a free service.

The solution synchronizes alerts between MSPs and their customer accounts, enabling seamless collaboration without compromising data privacy or control over workflows. It keeps everyone updated on incidents: MSPs can forward alerts to their customers, and OpsGenie routes information about customer responses and actions back to the MSP.  The solution also lets MSP customers escalate alerts to their MSP -- either automatically or manually. Alert updates keep customers informed about progress made by their MSP.  

Nowadays, in the broad IT technology market, large numbers of Managed Service Providers (MSPs) supply services for a wide variety of functions, such as monitoring, network, backup, and many others. Each MSP faces various challenges and has multiple goals to reach. MSPs can easily reach their goal of improving incident management for their customers, however, with the new OpsGenie MSP solution.  

Monitoring tools often send so much information and so many warnings that turn out to be false positives and noise. Dealing with this noise  can distract people and delay them from resolving real problems. As a result, IT companies invest time and money trying different tools that just don’t do the job.

The OpsGenie MSP solution provides alerting and notification capabilities that improve the incident response processes of both MSPs and their customers.

Our customizable notification policies and escalation schedules make sure that the right people can quickly take the right actions -- without having to waste time going through endless logs and following up on false positives.

The new MSP solution lets MSPs extend incident response management capabilities to their customers -- at no cost. It enables MSPs to synchronize actionable alerts and escalations with their customers: enabling seamless collaboration without compromising data privacy or control over workflows.

With the OpsGenie MSP solution, MSP customers get alert notifications:

• That inform. OpsGenie consolidates alerts intelligently and sends them to recipients with all relevant details and attachments.
• That matter. Alert notifications are based on alert severity level, because not all alerts are of the same importance.
• That reach people. Notifications are based on the time of day and on a wide variety of notification preferences that use a comprehensive set of communication channels to reach people wherever they are and however they work.

Why Become an OpsGenie MSP Partner?

• OpsGenie provides a seamless collaboration between you and your customers: you can synchronize alerts between your OpsGenie accounts to retain visibility and authority over processes.
• The MSP solution tracks your alert resolution lifecycle  and notifies your customers about issues and progress, to keep them in the loop.
• You can let your customers escalate alerts to you either automatically or manually -- and then track resolution progress through alert updates.
• The OpsGenie MSP plan is free for customers of MSPs. Your customers can use the free version or upgrade to an advanced plan to benefit from OpsGenie’s extensive integrations, schedules, escalations, and other advanced features.

Join our MSP Program and become an OpsGenie Partner now! 

At OpsGenie, it is important for us to provide the best user experience and to keep our integrations up-to-date. We are an early adopter of the newest features released by the companies with which we integrate.

OpsGenie’s Slack App is one of the most popular integrations with our customers. The Slack integration allows users to forward alerts to Slack channels, and then lets them interact with those alerts -- using either slash commands or Slack buttons. For more information, you can refer to ChatOps with Slack and OpsGenie page.

Today OpsGenie announces its new integration with Slack’s Message Menus, an interactive menu feature. Now, a simple set of menus lets you easily perform Assign, Take Ownership, and Snooze actions on alerts in the OpsGenie Slack App.

Assign Action:

By selecting Assign in the Slack Other actions menu, you can assign an alert to a specific user. When you select this option, the Slack App chat displays a Choose a user to assign the alert to menu. This menu will include the list of Slack users on your Slack team. If the Slack user you select in the related Choose a user list is connected to OpsGenie, the alert will be assigned to him/her successfully. That person becomes the Owner of the alert. If the Slack user you select is not yet connected to OpsGenie, an error message will be displayed. That user can connect to OpsGenie, by entering a /genie connect slash command (in the Slack chat). For more information, see “Chat User Mapping,” in our Slack App Configuration document.

Take Ownership Action:

By selecting Take Ownership in the Slack Other actions menu, you can take ownership of an alert that has already been assigned to someone else. If an alert has no current owner, however, you cannot immediately take ownership of the alert! Instead, take ownership by selecting Assign in the Other actions menu, and then selecting your own name in the Choose a user list of the Choose a user to assign the alert to menu.  

Snooze Action:

By selecting Snooze in the Slack Other actions menu, you can delay alert notifications for periods of five minutes up to a full day. The chat window displays a For how long do you want to snooze notifications for this alert menu. In the related Choose snooze time list, you set the alert to snooze for 5 min., 10 min., 15 min., 30 min., 1 hour, 2 hours, 6 hours, or 1 day. If you change your mind, you can repeat the process to select a new Snooze time; your most recently-entered Snooze time becomes the Snooze time for that alert.

With OpsGenie’s new integration for Slack’s Message Menus, executing OpsGenie Assign, Take Ownership, and Snooze actions is now simple and easy. If you have any questions about using the OpsGenie Slack App, you are welcome to contact us. And stay tuned for news about other new actions and improvements coming for our Slack App!

OpsGenie is proud to introduce its new community platform which allows users to engage with a variety of monitoring, ticketing and collaboration tools to better understand how they can be utilized in the OpsGenie platform.

Falls Church, VA – April 13, 2017 – OpsGenie announced today, the official opening of its new Community-based platform. The Community provides a collaborative environment where visitors can explore the use of tools involved in the incident response process, try out OpsGenie integrations and collaborate with other OpsGenie users.

OpsGenie is an incident response management solution and this new Community is intended to provide a dynamic and valuable opportunity for OpsGenie customers to share, learn about, and explore OpsGenie and the many tools that integrate with it. The Community is a forum for sharing information, for providing feedback and for addressing questions about OpsGenie’s features, integrations, APIs, and SDKs.  Community members are encouraged to discuss solutions tailored to their specific needs.  The Community is a place to share experiences implementing and supporting complex systems.  To allow for like-minded professionals to engage and collaborate on the problems and opportunities encountered while operating business critical applications and delivering business services.  To discuss the challenges of being on-call.  The Community is to be a forum in which both new and seasoned users can jointly raise and address any topics related to the Alerting and Incident Management space.  

The OpsGenie Community will also host the Playground. A new sandbox environment where visitors can not only visualize, but also interact with operations management solutions. This will not only include the OpsGenie solution, but showcase the integration of a variety of the leading monitoring, log management, ticketing, and collaboration tools.

“The new Community and its Playground provides an exciting opportunity for our users,” said OpsGenie CEO, Berkay Mollamustafaoglu. “Participants can share timely information, collaborate with their peers, and explore -- in a hands-on manner -- exactly how OpsGenie works with some of the many tools with which we integrate.”

The new Community, and Playground, are among OpsGenie’s recent set of new and enhanced features and capabilities focused on customers. Recent OpsGenie releases and updates have included: enhanced Atlassian integrations, new APIs and even an MSP Solution allowing Managed Service Providers to deliver a wider range of OpsGenie service options to their customers.

“The new OpsGenie Playground environment allows users to experience the power of a fully integrated incident management workflow using Atlassian and OpsGenie’s incident management tools. Incidents are becoming more common, and companies need to have the people, processes and technology in place to better respond and remediate incidents. As companies deal with this new reality and start thinking about what decisions need to be made to address this trend, they may not realize that many of the collaboration tools they use every day can be put to work in incident management too,” said Steve Goldsmith, general manager of HipChat at Atlassian. “By providing a demo environment for testers to directly engage with pre-configured OpsGenie integrations across Atlassian's HipChat, JIRA and StatusPage products will be a hugely valuable asset for current and potential customers."

About OpsGenie

OpsGenie is an incident response management solution for MSPs, developers, and operations teams. OpsGenie provides tools and integrations to design actionable alerts, manage on-call schedules and escalations, and ensure that the right people are notified of IT incidents at the right time, by means of a wide variety of notification methods. Learn more about our Community at https://opsgenie.com/community and our Playground at https://opsgenie.com/playground.

About Atlassian

Atlassian unleashes the potential in every team. Our collaboration software helps teams organize, discuss and complete shared work. Teams at more than 65,000 large and small organizations – including Citigroup, eBay, Coca-Cola, VISA, BMW, and NASA – use Atlassian’s project tracking, content creation and sharing, real-time communication, and service management products to work better together and deliver quality results on time. Learn about products including JIRA Software, Confluence, HipChat, Bitbucket, and JIRA Service Desk at https://atlassian.com.

Media Contact:
Nadia Mehra
571-748-7000
Nadia@OpsGenie.com

The need to synchronize the life cycles of both sides of our integrations made our system even more sophisticated!

When you provide SaaS that is integrated with other systems, services, and tools -- such as Datadog, New Relic, Nagios etc. --  flexibility, adaptability, and easy configurability become essential attributes of your service. These attributes help you do the necessary job more efficiently -- and help you supply customer needs more effectively.

Since integrations have an extensive coverage in what OpsGenie provides, we value the quality and the efficiency of our integrations. Because of this approach we put a lot of effort to enhance our integration framework. One of these recent enhancements has been providing “Action Mappings” in integrations.

Taking your integrations to the next level with Action Mappings!

With previous configuration classifying the alerts and actions performed on alerts were done using alert filters. With New OpsGenie Action mapping feature you can configure your integrations more thoroughly.

Almost all of our customers use OpsGenie with other systems/services/tools. This means almost all of them use our integrations. And we value the quality of user experience and we aim to make our customers happy since we know what it’s like to be woken up by an alert and the need for that alert to be very explanatory.

Because of these we decided to make our integrations’ configurations more specific and we developed Action Mappings.

Action Mappings is the perfect feature to synchronize the life cycles of both OpsGenie’s alerts and the customer’s system/service/tool’s alerts. With OpsGenie’s Action Mappings, after authorizing the OpsGenie’s let’s say ServiceNow integration there are two things you need to decide:

1- How do you want to create alerts from ServiceNow incidents and

2 - How do you want to forward the other OpsGenie alerts to ServiceNow incidents.

Let’s visualize this part:

As you can see from the GIF* above in OpsGenie side you can acknowledge, unacknowledge, snooze, escalate, close the alert or you can add a tag, a note, a recipient to the alert and so on. Next to them corresponding actions in ServiceNow are listed. You can match these actions the way you like. Let’s say an incident in ServiceNow created an alert in OpsGenie. And the alert is acknowledged by a user or another integration. You can configure the integration to automatically add a note the incident about the acknowledgement action.

* The GIF only shows the “For alerts created by ServiceNow” section. But the “For other OpsGenie alerts” section is the same as first section. You can view it yourself from here.

Why use Action Mappings?

You should use the new Action Mapping feature:

• If you need to synchronize different work environments.
• If you want more control over your alerts.
• If you simply like staying up-to-date with new technologies and features.

 Why not go ahead and get a trial account in OpsGenie , so you can make up your mind for yourself.

You’ve been using OpsGenie for a while now. You’re probably getting pretty good at it. You connected it to your monitoring and other tools. You set up alerts and schedules and teaming features. You’ve seen the differences it makes in your response times -- and in your sleep patterns.  

Yes: you know how to make OpsGenie do some stuff, but you wonder if there are other ways that you can use OpsGenie… different ways of doing things in OpsGenie… better ways of doing them… best practices?

You want to know you are doing your best...

We hear stories like that at conferences all over the world, from many veteran on-call users who want to know if they are doing the best they can. Because they care about what they do and know that the more expertise they have with OpsGenie, the more they can do for their organizations - and for their personal lives!

They can always talk to someone on our Customer Success team -- we are definitely there for them (and for you). We want to help everyone use our features in ways that will get them as excited as we are. Because we know that people can do things with OpsGenie that will further reduce their MTTRs, impress their teams, and give them extra time to spend with their - well, to spend more time with whoever or whatever they want.

But we also know that engineers and our other on-call users don’t always want to ask questions (/end understatement). After all, problem solving is a big part of your job… You tend to play around with something yourself or search for answers, if necessary. But you are left wondering if maybe you could do something better or save time with some task -- if someone else has ideas you could use.

OpsGenie’s Community can help you with that!

Well, now, there’s another way for you to hone your OpsGenie skills and knowledge -- and share our excitement! A Community and Playground, where you can learn and share OpsGenie and incident response best practices -- and try out solutions in our pre-configured sandboxes.

The OpsGenie Community is a forum where you can safely collaborate on problems and opportunities that you encounter in operating critical applications and services, being on-call, and optimizing your alerting and incident management solutions. Where you can search for information, watch videos, read, ask questions, and post about experiences with OpsGenie. Where you can even get information about tailoring solutions for your specific needs.

And the Community hosts the OpsGenie Playground, a new sandbox environment where you can try out incident and operations management solutions that include OpsGenie and a variety of integrations with leading monitoring, log management, ticketing, collaboration, and teaming tools. You can explore how we configured OpsGenie for common scenarios -- and talk with us and other like-minded people about such choices.    

For quick video tours of the Community and Playground, click the links below. Then, come try for yourself. You won’t be sorry, but -- if you are -- leave us feedback about what you want to see there, instead. Or ask a question (really): someone probably knows and will happily share!

A couple of months ago, we introduced the Action Mapping feature for OpsGenie’s outbound integrations with Cloud-based products. Now, we are proud to announce that the action mappings feature is also available for on-premise product integrations, through the Marid integration tool! In this blog post, we’ll explain how this works in OpsGenie’s on-premise JIRA integration. In order to support the same functionality for JIRA’s self-hosted, on-premises product, we decided to add the action mappings feature to JIRA’s Marid package.

JIRA is a great tool for software planning, bug and issue tracking, and project management. It has both a cloud version and a self-hosted version that is available for on-premise installations.  OpsGenie’s action mappings feature lets you decide what will happen in JIRA when you perform various actions in OpsGenie. You can create new issues, add comments to issues, and set the status of issues to IN PROGRESS, CLOSED, RESOLVED, or DONE. You can choose which actions to synchronize this way while you are configuring the OpsGenie-JIRA Integration. In order to support the same integration functionality both for the Cloud and Self-Hosted JIRA versions, we decided to add the action mappings feature to JIRA’s Marid package.

How to use the new Marid package to configure action mapping

Do you want to use our JIRA Marid package? It’s easy to set up:

• First, you need to enable our new Send via Marid checkbox, on the JIRA Integration page. That lets OpsGenie know that all of your configurations for the Integration will go through the Marid package.

• After that, you set the mappings by choosing what should be done in JIRA for different OpsGenie actions.

• You can configure other JIRA settings either on the JIRA Integration page or in the Marid configuration file: opsgenie-integration.conf.

Settings that you configure on the Integration page take precedence over ones that you configure in the Marid configuration file.

• Finally, you need to paste the API key for the integration into the opsgenie-integration.conf file, as the value for the apiKey field.

After you take these steps, install and start Marid. You can learn more about how to configure and use Marid in our JIRA integration document.

Now you are ready to use the Integration!

What if you want to set an issue’s status to a custom value that you defined in JIRA?

One of the benefits of using the Marid Integration tool is that you can easily modify the code that we provide to you. You can check how we developed the integration to support different actions, and then add or change necessary lines to perform your desired action.

We send which action is performed on OpsGenie so you can easily set what the script should do in that situation using a simple if-else condition.

Before you add such a condition, you set the mapping (on the JIRA integration page) for the action you want to take in JIRA when an action is taken in OpsGenie. Then you can change the code according to the action mapping you set and the action to be performed.

For example:

If I want to set to status of ACKNOWLEDGE whenever the corresponding OpsGenie alerts are acknowledged, I perform the following actions:

• First, I set a mapping for what happens when an alert is acknowledged in OpsGenie. Note that this is a dummy mapping which will be overridden later. In this case, I set the mapping to “status of the issue will be set to CLOSED” in JIRA:

• Next, I add a new if-else statement to the jiraActionExecutor.groovy file:

//----

else if(mappedAction == "closeIssue" && action == “Acknowledge”)

{

      //code to perform setting status to ACKNOWLEDGE in JIRA will be written here

}

//---

You can perform other custom actions in JIRA, by adding if-else statements, like the one above. Moreover, if you set custom mandatory fields in JIRA, you can add them to the payload for sending actions by modifying the groovy file.

OpsGenie’s new Marid package for the JIRA Integration gives you the ability to choose which actions to perform whenever an OpsGenie alert is created, updated, or closed —  which gives you more control over both alerts and issues. The new package also lets you easily change the code in order to support your custom actions and parameters.

Go ahead and test our integration! If you do not have an account yet, you can try OpsGenie for free!

Recently OpsGenie hosted a joint webinar with Signal Sciences, where Berkay Mollamustafaoglu, OpsGenie Co-Founder and CEO and Zane Lackey, Founder/CSO, Signal Sciences Corp, discussed how to secure your web applications using OpsGenie and Signal Sciences. 

Watch the webinar now!