Manage Cohesity Alerts in ServiceNow Event Management

In today’s IT organizations, keeping your company’s business services up and running smoothly is more critical to preventing disruptions to the overall business than ever before. To do that, you need to monitor your entire IT landscape effectively to be able to address problems promptly.

Event Management Helps You Keep Business Services Healthy

Use event management to protect against business disruptions by filtering incoming events to reduce noise as well as automatically generate alerts that are allowed to create incidents. You can automatically trigger IT processes for quick remediation of any issues that could affect the high availability of your business-critical services. 

In ServiceNow, Events are the occurrences that have significance for the management of IT infrastructure. ServiceNow Event Management checks the health of your business services and responds appropriately to any issues that arise. It also provides event and alert analysis to ensure business service continuity and performance. Read more about ServiceNow Event Management on their website. 

We are excited to announce the Cohesity ServiceNow application v4.2 update for the ServiceNow Paris release. With this update, you can now use ServiceNow Event Management to manage all your Events, Incidents, and Cohesity Alerts in one central place on ServiceNow. 

Cohesity Alerts as Events on ServiceNow

The v4.2 update (our Support for Paris release) of the Cohesity ServiceNow Integration now supports ServiceNow Event Management for Cohesity Alerts. The previous version also supported Cohesity Alert management, but using Incidents, not Events. (For more on that, see Use Webhooks to Manage Cohesity Alerts in ServiceNow.)

The Cohesity ServiceNow Integration uses ServiceNow’s Scripted REST APIs, a custom API created in the ServiceNow instance, to configure a webhook in your Cohesity cluster. Once you configure a webhook on your Cohesity cluster with the Scripted REST API, whenever a Cohesity Alert is generated, it creates an Event in the ServiceNow Event database. The generated Event creates the alert based on the predefined rules in the Alert database in ServiceNow. If the message key of the event matches with any of the alert’s message key, then the alert will be updated with the latest event’s information.

Set Up Cohesity Integration with ServiceNow Event Management

First, make sure the Cohesity ServiceNow Integration application is installed in the ServiceNow instance. To install the application, see the Cohesity ServiceNow Integration Install Guide. 

To configure the webhook for your Cohesity cluster in the Cohesity ServiceNow application:

1. Type ‘Cohesity’ in the Search bar. In the navigation pane under the Search box, navigate to Configuration > Cluster Configuration. To add a new Cohesity cluster, click New.
2. Enter the configuration information:
   1. Change the Configuration Type from Discover (the default) to Webhook or Discover and Webhook. 
   2. Set Alert Management to Incident or Event. This determines whether Cohesity Alerts appear as Incidents (the default) or Events in the ServiceNow instance. 
   3. Click the Webhook Configuration tab to edit the Alert Category and Alert Severity. Click the locks to save your choices.
3. Click Configure Webhook or Discover and Webhook (depending on which Category Type you selected).

For more details, see Configure Cohesity Cluster in the Cohesity ServiceNow Integration Install Guide. 

Manage Events

Whenever an Alert is generated in the configured Cohesity cluster, an Event will be generated in the ServiceNow instance. Once the Alert has been generated for the Event, you can resolve the Alert in the ServiceNow instance. 

To resolve a Cohesity Alert:

1. Type ‘Events’ in the Search bar In the Cohesity ServiceNow Integration application and navigate to Event Management > All Events. Click the Event that needs to be resolved.
2. Open the associated Alert record for the Event. Investigate and address the Alert issue.
3. Once you have resolved the issue, Close the Alert to invoke the REST API call that resolves the Alert in your Cohesity cluster. (This also closes the Event in ServiceNow.)

More Cohesity Resources for ServiceNow Integration

There are plenty of resources, including video demos, blogs, and documentation, to get you started with our ServiceNow integration. Check out the ServiceNow landing page on the Cohesity Developer Portal!

In future releases of this application, we plan to support more advanced Cohesity workflows. If there are workflows you’d like to see in an upcoming release, we would love to hear from you! Just send a note to the Cohesity API Integration team.