Bi-directional to IBM Netcool

[Vincent.a]

Hi.
I'm looking into integration for a customer who is running Nagios today but they are going to be using IBM Netcool.
I'm going to use SNMP Traps to get the information into Netcool, but the issue I'm having some issues resolving is getting information from Netcool into Nagios. I. E. if they clear an alarm in Netcool that information needs to be returned to Nagios.
Does anyone have experience with this and can point me in the right direction?

If more info is needed I will add more.

Best regards
Vincent Amundsen

Edit: I should have mentioned that we are running everything on Linux.

[mcapra]

I don't know anything about Netcool, so apologies in advance for anything particularly ignorant.

Does Netcool have some sort of "push" mechanism that can be attached to the action of "clearing an alert"? You could submit a passive check result back to Nagios XI, or an acknowledgement. It would sort of depend on how each solution is set up. If both of them are actively checking some state, you might re-work your setup to allow either Nagios XI or Netcool to be the final "authority" and make sure each application has those results. Pushing to Nagios XI would be much easier in my mind.

You could also have Nagios XI pull from Netcool, but that would likely involve a non-trivial amount of scripting. A naive solution would be a cron job that checks all problems in Nagios XI via the REST API and acknowledges those (via local NRDP or the external commands file) based on what is flagged as "cleared" in Netcool.

But if Netcool is functioning as a glorified message queue in this case, then you would definitely need a "push to Nagios XI" type of solution.

[dwhitfield]

@Vincent.a, unfortunately, we don't have a Netcool server here to test against. If you'd like to send us one, feel free!

I'd like to verify that the information @mcapra gave you is correct. Please let us know if you have any questions about those solutions.

[Vincent.a]

Thank you for your replies. My understanding is that a push-mechanism seems to be the best solution and I will look further into it. Netcool usually passes Ack-messages so if Nagios can receive and act upon that it shouldn't be that troublesome to fix. I looked some into the API for Nagios but as you stated; it seems a bit too naive to rely on.
As of right now we do not have a test environment set up for the client, but I'll post a link to one should I land myself in the situation where I can't seem to solve it myself.

If possible I'd love for this topic to be open a while more to see if anyone else has something to add, and I might receive more questions.
Once again, thank you very much for the pointers. When encountering a new program to integrate towards even the slightest nudge in a direction is helpful.

Best regards
Vincent Amundsen

[tgriep]

No problem, we'll keep the topic open in case someone has a solution for you to try out.