Moogsoft Incidents

Moogsoft is an AIOps powered monitoring and observability platform that enables IT & DevOps teams to manage and resolve incidents. xMatters uses Moogsoft’s AIOps to relay critical information to teams and prevent system issues from becoming service incidents.

This workflow lets you send actionable alerts to on-call resources when xMatters gets a signal from Moogsoft. Responders can initiate an incident with the press of a button, or you can build on the flow to perform automated resolution tasks.

How it works

When an alert is generated in Moogsoft, it sends a JSON-formatted webhook to xMatters, based on user-defined alert rules. A Moogsoft trigger in xMatters parses the webhook and initiates a flow that either creates a new incident or updates an existing one. The Moogsoft incident is updated with the xMatters Incident ID and any change to the incident in xMatters is sent back to Moogsoft and appended to the incident as a note.

Install the workflow

  1. Go to the Workflow Templates page and click the Moogsoft Incidents tile.
  2. On the Set up the Workflow tab, give the workflow a name that identifies its purpose (this must be unique in your instance), add an optional description, and set the default incident type (if applicable). Any built-in Initiate Incident steps in the workflow will automatically be set to the selected incident type.
    • You can edit these later, if needed.

  3. Click Next to set up the connection.
  4. Choose the authentication method. A trigger URL is generated based on the selected authentication method.
  5. Copy the trigger URL — you’ll use this to configure the webhook in Moogsoft.
    • The trigger URL includes the recipients parameter, which specifies who should be notified. By default, this parameter is set to notify you (the logged in user), but you can set it to target any user or group you want.

  6. Copy the Configuration Payload to configure the signal in Moogsoft.
  7. Click Open Workflow to view and customize the workflow, or Close to return to the Workflows page.

Configure Moogsoft to send requests to the trigger URL

To have Moogsoft send alerts to the flow trigger, you need to configure a webhook and set it to use the trigger URL, and create a custom user property to connect your Moogsoft and xMatters accounts. You can also set the Moogsoft correlation engine to combine similar alerts into Moogsoft incidents.

Configure xMatters to send updates to Moogsoft

To send updates to Moogsoft, the workflow requires a valid Moogsoft email address, API key credentials, and a token endpoint. The following instructions describe how to create a custom property for the email address, generate the API key, and configure a token endpoint.

Set recipients in the trigger URL

The trigger expects the recipients in the trigger URL. When you copy the URL from xMatters, it includes the recipients parameter: recipients=<yourname>. Of course, you don’t want to receive all the alerts.

To change the recipients for alerts from this webhook, swap out your name for the people or groups you want to target.

  • For URL authentication, use an ampersand to attach recipients. For example, if you want to notify Emma Pearson and the on-call members in the group responsible for the Antares service, you'd add &recipients=epearson,antares to the URL.
  • For other authentication types, use a question mark to attach recipients. For example, if you want to notify Barry Gull and the on-call members in the group responsible for the Cassiopeia service, you'd add ?recipients=bgull,cassiopeia to the URL.

Remember to URL-encode any special characters, including spaces, in your group names.

We recommend using groups so you can take advantage of the xMatters group features — rotations, escalations, and absences — to reach the right on-call people to jump on an issue.

How to use the workflow

The Moogsoft Incidents workflow performs two-way communication between xMatters and Moogsoft. When condition you've set fires, it sends a signal to xMatters, which either creates a new incident or updates an existing one. When there is a change to the incident in xMatters, an update is sent back to Moogsoft.

Next Steps

Now that you've installed the workflow, you can use it as-is, or customize it to suit your needs better. Here are some examples of things you can add to the workflow to customize it: