Control-M Integration Guide

Benefits

• It allows businesses to control their applications across multiple operating systems while having full visibility into their operations.
• It allows users to receive messages and also take action to rectify issues.

How it Works

• PagerDuty needs to be configured to receive events and create user actions in order to be able to send and receive smarter alerts directly to your mobile device and handling the escalation procedures.
• A web server will need to be configured by your Administrators to allow an endpoint for PagerDuty to reach so it can communicate to scripts running on your server
• CFS has built custom scripts that allow for the communication and interaction between Control-M and PagerDuty. 

Requirements

• PagerDuty integrations require an Admin base role for account authorization. If you do not have this role, please reach out to a PagerDuty Admin or Account Owner within your organization to configure the integration.
• Please reach out to operations@cfsolutions-inc.com to discuss an integration opportunity.

Support

This integration is built and supported by CFSolutions. If you need help with this integration, contact operations@cfsolutions-inc.com

Integration Walkthrough

Please contact CFS Consulting at operations@cfsolutions-inc.com for more information about setting up an integration that works for you.

In Control-M

Terminology

SHOUT:

• There exists a SHOUT table that stores a set of executable file locations or other destinations to send a message to. The keys of this table are unique and logical names that represent that shout destination.
• A SHOUT is a call to a destination in the SHOUT table. This is the invocation of a script or the sending of information to a Control-M component.
• Herein referred to as a shout.

Alert

• An alert is any of the generated messages that Control-M produces in their Alerts Window. The majority of these are automatic however a job can also use a SHOUT to produce an additional alert.

Knowing this terminology beforehand we can now start to configure Pagerduty with Control-M. Firstly, we will look at shouts which are a type of alert generated by jobs under certain conditions, and then we will move on to the alerts that Control-M already generates.

To set up a SHOUT:

• A shout is a location, such as a script on the server, where a message is sent.
• These are invoked at the job level when they experience certain events such as the job ended with a specific return code, there was a specific statement found in the output, or if the job has run X number of times.
• When configuring a shout, a Scheduler will be required to configure jobs to take this action to send information to the shout destination with all the necessary information passed along.
• A Control-M Administrator will also be required to set up the shouts table in the CCM. This will mean adding in the shout entry that points to the custom CFS script located on the filesystem.

Setting up Alerts:

 All alerts that Control-M generates can be redirected to a customized script allowing for even more information to be captured. To accomplish this, only two parameters need to be updated which allows the EM to redirect all alerts to a script.

1. The script will then be able to filter these alerts to determine what is of importance and send them off to PagerDuty using the web server’s capabilities.
2. The parameter called SendSnmp allows for you to redirect the alerts while the SendAlarmToScript is the actual file location of the script that will receive these alerts. Be sure to place this script in a place that is reachable from your instance and can be executed.

At this point, Control-M is configured to send messages out to a custom script that is capable of then relaying the message to PagerDuty with the help of a web server. It is important to note that the type of information sent along with this message is very important and must include some very specific details to allow PagerDuty to process the alert, give responders enough information to respond, and for Control-M to be capable of taking the right action.

Please contact CFS Consulting at operations@cfsolutions-inc.com for more information about setting up an integration that works for you.