How to receive an email from a separate internal application and use that to trigger something in solarwinds?

My first thought is to cut out the middleman (ie: email) and have your monitoring solution watch the thing that is happening to trigger the email, and have it (monitoring) do that instead. We can discuss that further, but I had to contribute my 2 cents.

Second, you COULD write an email processing routine, but that is fairly tedious and by and large error prone. So there are some other options.

1. you can have whatever is triggering the email ALSO trigger a trap or syslog message and send THAT in to your SolarWinds environment. Those are natively processed and show up on a variety of consoles, reports, alerts, etc.
2. you can have whatever is triggering the email ALSO use the SolarWinds API (see here: Orion SDK) to do <things> in SolarWinds. Insert data, update a system, etc.

Ultimately, it's difficult to speak comprehensively about how to solve this without knowing more about the entire situation. What is going wrong, what is triggering the email, what information is IN the email, etc. But hopefully this gets your brain working in the right direction. Feel free to follow up in the comments below.

And also welcome to the wonderful world of SolarWinds!

Good Afternoon and thank you for your feedback

In short - its a kornshell script that basically runs a check and sends an email based on the check. So its really no error - more so a notification which i would want to use to create an ALERT and have it on the solarwinds Console.

The developer wouldn't have time to rewrite the script to give me an output, so i thought it would be easiest to possible do something with the email that its producing.

Can you speak more on the below? How can i trap the email message? Can a certain dist list be added that i can key off of? Can i go through my email server? looking forward to your feedback.

1. you can have whatever is triggering the email ALSO trigger a trap or syslog message and send THAT in to your SolarWinds environment. Those are natively processed and show up on a variety of consoles, reports, alerts, etc.

jrovar​ While it's probably not the best solution, the Web Help Desk product works directly off an inbox feed (careful, it removes all mail from that address). If you were to include/forward your emails to a different address, WHD should be able to do it pretty easily.

In regards to what adatole​ mentioned, I believe he was referring to the source of the email, your ksh script, but that was before you mentioned the dev would not be rewriting the script. He meant the script could fire off the email AND/OR the syslog message, sending the syslog message directly to your Orion server.

Which SolarWinds product(s) do you have?

Well, you could just take the ksh script lock, stock, and barrel and run it inside SolarWinds (presuming you have SAM) and then you would be monitoring the whole server/application/whatever AND you could have that custom monitor in one place (with the extra benefit of having historical data on the script output.

Barring that, wluther​ is on the right path. Along with the email, just have the admin add a line to send a syslog message. Then you set up the on-server syslog to forward those specific messages into Orion.

Easiest option would be to write a POP3 or IPAM email fetch script in SAM that looks for the existence of a specific email.

VBScript Search IMAP Mailbox for Email Matching Criteria

Hi aLTeReGo​ wluther adatole we have recently brought an application that triggers email alerts for the some the exception error, which is more focused on that application. How do your solutions work in the scenario mentioned? Where should I create a pop3 or IMAP script to fetch whose error? Also, the team wants to trigger Solarwinds alerts after they receive x numbers of numbers for like if you get 4xx error in 15 mins? Can you control that?

Also, we have already have Service-now ticketing tool and using the help desk production would that forward those in the SNOW somehow?

I am hoping to get some help from you guys.

please let me know if we need a call.

Thanks

Nishil

We use SolarWinds as the 'Monitor of Monitors' and several of our alerts come from out on the internet. The easiest way to get a message through our firewalls is through an email message.

Additionally many of the items we monitor only support email. These include environmental monitoring, camera systems, UPS's, etc.

To solve this we installed a small instance of Splunk and used their Email app to scrape the mailbox. Splunk then pulls the Subject and Body of the email and sends it to SolarWinds via an Syslog Message.

It would be nice if SolarWinds did this out of the box.

A long time ago I used a program called Email to DB I found out on the internet. It wasn't too expensive and also did the same thing - send syslogs as one of the actions.

The script would be written as a Script Monitor in SAM and executed against the server where the email is sent to by your application. That could be Office365, a local Exchange Server, etc.

How the script works would be entirely up to you to decide. It could trigger only when there are X number of emails found within a specified amount of time for example if that's how you wrote it. SAM supports integration with SNOW, so if you wanted to raise this up as an alert which opened a ticket in SNOW, that rather trivial to setup.