In the digital era we’re living in, where data reigns supreme and agility is paramount, the convergence of Splunk and OpsBridge represents more than just a technological merger; it signifies a paradigm shift in IT management. As organizations grapple with the exponential growth of data and the ever-increasing complexity of their IT landscapes, the integration of these two powerhouse platforms offers a beacon of hope amidst the chaos.

By seamlessly blending the real-time insights provided by Splunk with the robust operational capabilities of OpsBridge, IT teams are empowered to navigate the intricate web of modern data ecosystems with unparalleled precision and efficiency. Gone are the days of siloed data and disjointed workflows; instead, this integration paves the way for a unified approach to IT operations, where disparate streams of information converge to paint a comprehensive picture of system health and performance.

As we embark on this journey of exploration, we will uncover the transformative potential inherent in the Splunk-OpsBridge synergy. From the seamless correlation of diverse data sources to the automation of routine tasks, and the proactive identification of potential issues before they escalate into full-blown crises, the possibilities are limitless. Join us as we delve into the intricacies of this integration and discover how it promises to revolutionize IT management, streamline operational workflows, and elevate decision-making processes to unprecedented heights.

Splunk Enterprise in details

Splunk is a powerful data analytics platform designed to help organizations make sense of their data through real-time monitoring, searching, and analysis. Its popularity stems from several key features:

• Data Aggregation and Indexing: Splunk can ingest and index large volumes of machine-generated data from various sources, including logs, metrics, and events, enabling comprehensive visibility across the organization's IT infrastructure.
• Search and Investigation: Splunk offers a robust search language and intuitive interface, allowing users to quickly search, filter, and analyze data to uncover insights, troubleshoot issues, and investigate security incidents.
• Visualization and Dashboards: With customizable dashboards and visualization tools, Splunk enables users to create dynamic visual representations of data, making it easier to understand trends, patterns, and anomalies.
• Alerting and Monitoring: Splunk can proactively monitor data in real-time and trigger alerts based on predefined thresholds or conditions, empowering organizations to take timely action in response to critical events or performance issues.
• Machine Learning and AI: Splunk's machine learning capabilities enable automated anomaly detection, predictive analytics, and trend analysis, helping organizations identify potential issues and opportunities more effectively.
• Security and Compliance: Splunk provides robust security features, including log management, threat detection, and compliance reporting, to help organizations protect their data, detect security threats, and meet regulatory requirements.
• Integration and Extensibility: Splunk integrates with a wide range of third-party tools and technologies, allowing organizations to leverage existing investments and extend Splunk's capabilities to address specific use cases or requirements.

Operations Bridge Manager in details

Operations Bridge Manager (OBM) serves as a "single pane of glass" for IT operations, offering a centralized and holistic view of an organization's IT environment. This unified view consolidates data from diverse sources, providing IT teams with comprehensive insights into applications, servers, networks, and services. OBM's key features include unified monitoring, event correlation, visualization, automation, integration, scalability, and security, empowering organizations to optimize IT operations and deliver reliable services efficiently.

Here are its key features:

• Unified Monitoring: OBM aggregates data from various IT systems, providing a comprehensive view of the IT landscape, aiding quick issue identification and resolution.
• Event Correlation and Analysis: OBM analyzes data streams to detect patterns, correlating events to pinpoint root causes, enhancing incident response and service availability.
• Visualization and Dashboarding: OBM offers customizable dashboards to display real-time status and operational insights, enabling proactive management and decision-making.
• Automation and Orchestration: OBM integrates with automation tools to streamline workflows, improving efficiency and accelerating incident resolution.
• Integration with IT Service Management (ITSM) Tools: OBM seamlessly integrates with ITSM platforms like ServiceNow for end-to-end incident management, ensuring consistent and auditable resolution.
• Scalability and Flexibility: OBM scales across distributed environments, supporting large volumes of data and adaptable deployment options.
• Security and Compliance: OBM includes security monitoring and compliance features, safeguarding organizations and ensuring regulatory compliance.

OpsBridge (Operations Bridge Manager) Splunk integration challenges:

• Compatibility issues: Differences in data formats, protocols, or versions between OpsBridge and Splunk may hinder seamless integration.
• Data volume and velocity: Managing large volumes of data and rapid data flow between OpsBridge and Splunk can strain integration capabilities, requiring robust data management strategies.
• Data interpretation consistency: Maintaining accuracy and consistency in data interpretation across both platforms demands thorough understanding of each system's data models and semantics, along with effective mapping and transformation mechanisms.
• Security and compliance: Ensuring security and compliance throughout the integration process is essential, requiring stringent access controls, encryption, and audit trails to safeguard sensitive operational data against potential threats and breaches.

Splunk integration with OpsBridge Manager (OBM) benefits:

• Enhanced visibility: Integrating OpsBridge with Splunk provides a comprehensive view of IT infrastructure and application performance, facilitating proactive monitoring, troubleshooting, and decision-making.
• Improved operational efficiency: By centralizing data from OpsBridge and Splunk, organizations can streamline incident detection, root cause analysis, and resolution processes, reducing mean time to repair (MTTR) and minimizing business impact.
• Scalability and flexibility: The combined capabilities of OpsBridge and Splunk enable organizations to scale their monitoring and analytics infrastructure to meet evolving business needs, supporting growth and agility.
• Advanced analytics and insights: Leveraging Splunk's powerful analytics capabilities, integrated with OpsBridge data, allows organizations to gain deeper insights into performance trends, anomalies, and optimization opportunities, driving continuous improvement and innovation.
• Cost savings: By eliminating silos and redundancies in monitoring and analytics tools, the integration of OpsBridge and Splunk can lead to cost savings through streamlined operations, resource optimization, and reduced tool sprawl.

Why ZigiOps no-code integration platform?

ZigiOps is a dynamic integration platform designed to streamline data synchronization and automate workflows across diverse IT systems. With its agile and reliable solution, ZigiOps offers real-time data synchronization between Operations Bridge (OpsBridge) and Splunk, ensuring enhanced visibility and collaboration across IT operations teams.

Its advanced data filtering capabilities enable the transfer of only relevant information, optimizing resource utilization and reducing noise. ZigiOps' scalability and flexibility allow it to adapt to evolving business needs and IT infrastructure requirements, making it an ideal choice for companies seeking efficient OpsBridge-Splunk integration.

Benefits of Splunk integration with OpsBridge via ZigiOps include:

• Enhanced visibility and collaboration across IT operations teams
• Real-time synchronization of data between OpsBridge and Splunk
• Advanced data filtering ensures transfer of relevant information
• Scalable and flexible solution to adapt to evolving business needs
• Optimizes resource utilization and reduces noise
• Drives efficiency, improves decision-making, and maximizes integration value

OpsBridge Splunk integration use case scenarios

There are two common reasons for companies to connect Splunk Enterprise with OpenText Operations Bridge Manager:  

• transferring events/alerts

In the first scenario, ZigiOps gathers Splunk events and transmits them to OpsBridge as events. This platform seamlessly synchronizes all pertinent host details and additional information, ensuring instantaneous connectivity and efficient communication. You can tailor the listener protocol, port, path, and expressions to your requirements or use the default settings provided by the template.

In the second scenario, ZigiOps captures Alerts from Splunk and subsequently relays them to OpsBridge as events. Leveraging its adaptable field mapping capabilities, the platform synchronizes all relevant host details along with other pertinent information such as Description, Category, Timestamp, Title, Node, and more.

Installing ZigiOps

Integrating OpsBridge and Splunk with ZigiOps is straightforward. Available for iPaaS and on-premises environments, ZigiOps installs in minutes with a few clicks—no coding required.

Its intuitive login with username and password ensures easy and secure access. For more details, visit the documentation section.

ZigiOps Dashboard

After logging into ZigiOps, users are taken to the main Dashboard, the central hub for monitoring integrations. Here, they can view the number of system integrations, active licenses, system statuses, and insights like record counts, essential statistics, and overall platform health. This comprehensive view ensures efficient management and optimal performance of integrations.

Connected systems menu

In ZigiOps, the Connected Systems Menu allows users to easily access and manage integrations, including Splunk and OpsBridge. Clicking "Add a new system" provides immediate access to a wide range of available systems, facilitating seamless integration possibilities.

Splunk Enterprise to OpsBridge (OBM) integration

Before starting the integration, ZigiOps must be connected to both Splunk and OpsBridge (OBM). This process is quick and hassle-free.

Connecting ZigiOps to Splunk Enterprise

Since Splunk Enterprise is our source systems, it’s logical to be connected to ZigiOps first. The process is fast and requires little to no effort:

• Log In: Access your ZigiOps instance.
• Load Template: Navigate to ZigiOps → Configurator and load the integration template.
• Select Systems: Choose the desired Integrated Systems and click Save to proceed.
• Enable Integration: Use the Slider button in the middle of the screen to activate the integration.

Connecting ZigiOps to OpsBridge (OBM)

• Log In: Access your ZigiOps instance.
• Add System: Go to Connected Systems → Add New System → OpsBridge.
• Configure Parameters:
• Server URL: Enter your OpsBridge instance URL (e.g., https://obm.example.com).
• Username: Provide the Connected Server username (needed for event integrations).
• Password: Enter the password for the above user.
• Downtime Service Username: Provide the OBM Downtime Service username (needed for downtime integrations).
• Downtime Service Password: Enter the password for the Downtime Service username.

• RTSM Username: Provide the OBM RTSM username (needed for downtime or uCMDB integrations).
• RTSM Password: Enter the password for the RTSM username.
• Proxy Settings: Enable if using a proxy server.
• Save Configuration: Verify the settings and click Save.

Splunk Enterprise Operations Bridge Manager (OBM) integration

ZigiOps offers numerous pre-defined integration templates ready for immediate use. Users can also customize these templates to fit specific requirements or create their own.  

When using the Splunk Operations Bridge Manager (OBM) integration template, it's essential to define the Source and Destination systems: Splunk as the Source and OBM as the Destination. Carefully specify the entities to be transferred or synced to ensure accurate integration.

As a comprehensive integration platform, ZigiOps provides a range of functionalities that give users complete control over the entire OpsBridge-Splunk integration process and the data flow between the systems. These functionalities include action levels. In the current integration use case scenario, ZigiOps offers one specific action:

• Search events

Here, we can the details surrounding our Source system in the integration – in our case, that’s Splunk Enterprise. We can see the type of data (entity) we’re going to transfer to OBM – event. A crucial part of ZigiOps are the filters. In general, filters are crucial in integration processes as they enhance data relevance by ensuring only necessary and pertinent information is transferred between systems, thereby improving the accuracy and usefulness of the integrated data.  

They also improve system efficiency by reducing the volume of data processed and transferred, optimizing performance and minimizing system load. That’s why ZigiOps’ users are able to talor them – pick the type (time, in our case), choose the operator and select the desired value - {lastevent}.

Expressions are also critical part of the integration with ZigiOps. Triggers define the mechanisms that initiate the execution of an action. These triggers act as catalysts, setting off the operational processes within a system or between systems. They determine when and under what conditions a specific action or workflow is started, ensuring that the integration or process automation functions seamlessly and in accordance with predefined criteria. Depending on the context, operation triggers can be event-based, schedule-based, or manually invoked, allowing for flexible and precise control over action initiation.  

Like the Filters, users can add as many Expressions as needed and specify each data segment in them to match the integration use case. Expressions in ZigiOps are configured within the Source tab, where variables are defined and various expression types are specified based on the desired operation. Typically, the expression is applied to a source field to perform specific tasks.

These expressions offer multiple functionalities: they can replace text, extract a substring, scan a fixed number of characters, format date and time, among other operations. The "Last time" expression is particularly common, as it helps prevent duplicate data by extracting only the new information added since the last data extraction. This functionality is essential in most integrations for managing metrics, incidents, tasks, or events (as in our current use case scenario), ensuring that only the latest data is collected and processed.

ZigiOps also has field mapping capabilities to further enhance the Splunk OpsBridge integration experience. Why is this important? Field Mapping generally specifies the data that will be sent to the entity in the target system. It determines which fields in the target system will be created or updated, and the values that will be populated or assigned to those fields. These values typically originate from the source system.  

In the current Splunk Enterprise OpsBridge (Operations Bridge Manager) the field mapping capabilities of ZigiOps allow users to add description, category, subcategory, title, timestamp and more as filters thus making the data flow between the integrated systems much more precise.

Conclusion

Integrating Splunk with OpsBridge using ZigiOps enhances the capabilities of both platforms by enabling seamless data flow and synchronization. ZigiOps simplifies the integration process with its ready-to-use templates and flexible customization options, allowing users to tailor the integration to their specific needs. By leveraging ZigiOps, organizations can ensure efficient data exchange, improve operational insights, and maintain data consistency across their systems. This integration streamlines workflows and enhances the effectiveness of IT operations management and analytics.