Event-based notifications for alerting users

Send email notifications and generate incidents in BMC Helix IT Service Management to notify operators about important issues or changes. Help operators prioritize events quickly and more efficiently.

Notifications can be triggered automatically when the selected events meet a set criteria. This event selection criteria is defined while you are creating a notification type of event policy.

By using a notification policy, you can trigger the following kinds of notifications:

  • Email
  • Incident creation in BMC Helix IT Service Management 


Email notification

The email notification policy enables you to define specific event conditions and the actions to be taken when those event conditions are met. Specifying the event actions is optional. 

Email notifications can be triggered based on the following conditions defined in the notification policy:

  • Based on the event selection criteria: This is the main criteria for triggering a notification. Based on this condition, events are selected for applying the notification policy. Providing this criteria is mandatory. 
  • Based on change of basic event attributes: A notification is triggered if the status or severity of the selected event changes. The condition that you specify in the notification criteria is considered as part of the event selection criteria to process events. Providing this condition is optional.

You can configure the email notification settings that contain the subject, the message, and a comma-separated list of valid email addresses for the notification.

Notification settings

Description

Notification Service

Select one of the following options:

  • Email
  • Incident

The default option is Email.

Send Notification to

Email addresses of the notification email recipients.

You can specify email addresses by using one of the following options:

Subject

Subject of the notification email.

You can specify the email subject by using one of the following options:

  • Static value
    For example, Critical event: Needs urgent attention.
  • Global variables
    For example, $GV.NOTIFICATION_GV.SEVERITY event: Needs urgent attention.
  • Slot placeholders
    For example, %severity% event: Needs urgent attention.
    The slot names are replaced with slot values in the incoming event when the policy is applied.

For event slots of the date data type, the email notification displays the date as per the date format and time zone configured

on the User Preferences page of the notification policy owner.

Message

Content of the notification email.

You can specify the email message by using one of the following options:

  • Static value
    For example, Critical event: Needs urgent attention.
  • Global variables
    For example, $GV.NOTIFICATION_GV.SEVERITY event: Needs urgent attention.
  • Slot placeholders
    For example, %severity% event: Needs urgent attention.
    The slot names are replaced with slot values in the incoming event when the policy is applied.

For event slots of the date data type, the email notification displays the date as per the date format and time zone configured

on the User Preferences page of the notification policy owner.

Notification Criteria

Criteria for the notification.

Send notifications based on the severity and status of the event.

Notification Actions

Actions to execute on the notification.

You can set one of the following notification actions:

  • The selected event can be automatically assigned to a user.
  • The selected event status can be updated to Acknowledged.

Important

  • Any change to the date format and time zone on the User Preferences page may take up to 15 minutes to reflect in the email notification.
  • For scenarios where notification policies do not have an owner, dd/MM/yyyy HH:mm and UTC are used as the default date format and time zone respectively.


Slot placeholders in the notification email address.png


BMC Helix IT Service Management incident

If you are using the integration with BMC Helix IT Service Management for Proactive Service Resolution (PSR), use the Predefine Policy for Incident to create an incident in BMC Helix IT Service Management after an event arrives in BMC Helix Operations Management. This policy is automatically enabled when BMC Helix Operations Management is registered to BMC Helix Integration Service after the integration with BMC Helix IT Service Management. For more information, see Integrating-with-BMC-Helix-ITSM-by-using-the-Integration-Service.

The notification policy also triggers an incident in BMC Helix IT Service Management for an event if the slot value in the event changes from null or empty to a non-empty value due to event policy execution.

Important

If only the _repeat_count slot for an event gets updated, then, by default, the system does not send an incident notification for an event update to BMC Helix IT Service Management.

To configure a list of event slots for which you do not want to trigger an incident in BMC Helix IT Service Management when there is an event update (slot value update) in BMC Helix Operations Management, contact BHOM Support.


 

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