Now I know your going to enjoy this…

I recently spoke about Trello, and how we can use boards and cards to organise our work using a sort of online kanban board. I recently read a release from the Trello team “Email to cards”,  i.e. i can send an email to an address saying “Make sure you do this” with my notes in the email body, and it will add a new card with the subject as the title, and my notes in the card. This is to save people time and allow them to email cards on the go, etc (Further information here: http://blog.trello.com/create-cards-via-email/).

Now this gave me an idea… What if, instead of having lists for “To Do”, “Doing”, “Done”, etc we have lists for “New tickets”, “In Queue”, etc and actually used Trello as a communal help desk tool? We could then have our service desk team login to Trello to assign tickets to departments or users using labels, or even “Assign to” as below:

You can then even colour code the alerts to reflect different priorities too. As above, we’ve got just the one ticket being worked which is a C:/ drive full issue on “SERVER”. This of course requires us to manually log tickets which is fine, but what you could do is integrate your monitoring tool with Trello using the “Email to” as mentioned above.

In Opsview Enterprise, we have the service desk connectors which work using API’s to connect to ServiceNow, RequestTracker, JIRA, Service Cloud and OTRS – but by using the email-to, you can actually do this example in Core / Pro or Enterprise and its actually very simple.

Firstly, check that your Opsview system can mail-to the Trello board. To do this, you actually have to tell Trello to accept “emailed-in” cards by clicking “Show sidebar > menu > settings > Email settings” and copy that email address – it should be something bit and unruly like: [email protected]

Next, go to your Opsview system and test you can email to the address so that a card shows up (may need to setup your MTA on the Opsview server first, etc):

root@ov-trn:/home/smarsh# mail -s "Test email" [email protected]
This is a critical error
.
Cc:
root@ov-trn:/home/smarsh#

We then check on our Trello board and voila!

How cool is that? Now we know our Opsview system can email-to-card, lets setup some alerts in Opsview using the guide I wrote here: link

Essentially, add a new contact called “trello-helpdesk” with the contact email of [email protected] as we used above:

Then now we have our email configure, we navigate to “Submit and edit notification profiles” and add a new profile such as “Network Errors” or “All” depending on what errors/which devices you want an auto-ticket raising for.

Firstly, specifiy “Email” as we want the alert sent to our Trello.com email address:

Next, scroll down and choose your devices/services you want to be alerted for. Im going to leave all my devices checked as i want to get maximum traffic for this demo. And finally at the bottom, choose the error criteria on the devices we’ve selected:

So here we are sending alerts all the time (24×7), and sending as soon as an alert is generated. And we’re doing it for any error on a host, or any error on a service (so we should have a good chance of something sticking!). Click submit and reload, and next lets check our Trello-desk!

Here we can see 2 errors have come into our “new tickets” queue for our Service Desk Manager to dole out. And if we click onto a “ticket”, we can see the body of the alert:

Closing thoughts

So there we have it, with pretty much 0 effort we have Opsview Core logging tickets into our Trello (Both free products) giving us a truly interactive monitoring/helpdesk solution. Enjoy!