[rt-users] Making RT and Altiris play nice

[Jason A. Smith]

On Thu, 2009-06-04 at 14:17 -0700, Tom Lahti wrote:
> > Medium Incident #11495 has been reassigned by Somebody
> > 
> > So of course our RT makes it:
> > 
> > [rt.local #104] Medium Incident #11495 has been reassigned by Somebody
> > 
> > Anytime the Altiris system updates their ticket we create a new one and
> > anytime RT updates our ticket they create a new one.
> > 
> > If anyone has ideas around this issue, I would love to hear them.
> 
> You need a script at both ends to massage the outgoing subject into the one
> needed by the other end, after it comes out of the tracking system in
> question.  It would need to store ticket number associations for future
> emails, possibly in a database table.  You could attach this script to a
> special email alias just for this purpose on both ends, which then generates
> a new email with the desired subject line to the real email address for the
> tracking system.

We have a system setup here to receive emails from a few different
ticketing systems (FootPrints, Remedy & GGUS).  Our system works with a
few coordinated pieces, using custom fields in RT to store the other
ticketing system's identifier.

1.  A scrip in RT is triggered on transactions and when a message is
present it scans the message subject for an appropriate regex pattern
that identifies an external ticketing system and saves the identifier in
a custom field.

2.  A procmail filter script that processes all incoming email before it
is passed to the rt-mailgate.  This filter does the same subject search
for the external ticketing system's identifier.  When an identifier is
found, the RT API is used to perform a search on the appropriate custom
field.  When a matching ticket is found, the email subject is modified
to insert our RT ticket identifier for that matching ticket number,
which allows the rt-mailgate to route the email to the correct RT
ticket.  This filter, if necessary, will also modify the ticket subject
directly in RT to contain the identifier of all ticket systems, so email
sent by RT should be accepted by the other ticket systems and routed
properly (assuming that they tag email subjects with their identifiers
just like RT does).

To prevent mail loops, we need to have NotifyActor disabled on our RT
server.  Also, since some other ticket systems have their equivalent of
NotifyActor enabled, emails we receive for resolved RT tickets have our
RT address modified to the comment address to prevent reopening tickets.
Otherwise the resolved email RT sends would reopen the ticket when the
other ticketing system echos that email back to us.

~Jason


-- 
/------------------------------------------------------------------\
|  Jason A. Smith                          Email:  smithj4 at bnl.gov |
|  Atlas Computing Facility, Bldg. 510M    Phone: +1-631-344-4226  |
|  Brookhaven National Lab, P.O. Box 5000  Fax:   +1-631-344-7616  |
|  Upton, NY 11973-5000,  U.S.A.                                   |
\------------------------------------------------------------------/

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: smime.p7s
Type: application/x-pkcs7-signature
Size: 3906 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.bestpractical.com/pipermail/rt-users/attachments/20090604/06436fb4/attachment.bin>