Hi all, Felt like sharing a little story from the pre-sales side.
Just finished off a successful POC with a potential customer for AlertMagic.
Input system: Meraki Alerts
Output system: AutoTask PSA
The use case was fairly straight forward. Email-based alerts from Meraki often give very little context and are generally fairly uncustomizable when it comes to separating them between multiple customers. They also lack state, so any repeated alerts for the same issue would just generate new tickets.
Problems along the way:
- Meraki custom field for SharedSecrets did not seem to be usable in the header fields of the webhooks, leading to some extended troubleshooting. Now we know, so this should not be a problem in future implementations
- AlertMagic did not initially like not having the added context of LogicMonitor on top of Meraki, but this was solved such that we no longer rely on that context, the Meraki Alert reduction is now fully standalone
Immediate value:
- Meraki Webhooks lets us provide a lot more context to the created tickets
- Inserting a custom value into the Webhooks also lets us separate between the different customers
- AlertMagic can update existing tickets with repeated alerts for the same issue, reducing noise in the ticket queue
Future value:
- With further customization, AlertMagic can reduce the tickets even more. The initial implementation was purposefully kept simplistic just to prove the integration works as intended.
- Potential improvements to the content of the tickets as well as extended automated diagnostics are now possible since AlertMagic has the capability for it, time will tell if the customer wants to go forward with this
All in all, after solving a few initial hickups, everyone’s happy!
Feel free to reach out if you’re still trudging through the infinite inbox scrolling that is Meraki email based alerts, if you find the email-to-ticket implementations too limiting, or if you’re looking to do some ticket deduplication for repeated alerts!