Integrating monitoring software with Argus

In essence, to integrate your existing monitoring systems with Argus means to ensure your Argus incident database is synchronized with the alerts stemming from your monitoring systems.

To ensure this, you will need what is termed a glue service.

Glue services

What is a glue service?

A glue service is any piece of software capable of receiving alerts from your monitoring system and translating these into incident state changes that are communicated to the Argus API server.

A glue service for your particular monitoring system may already exist, or you may need to write your own.

Existing glue services

Writing your own glue service

If there is no pre-existing glue service software for your particular monitoring system, we’ve provided a guide for writing your own.

Integrating an existing monitoring system

Each instance of a monitoring system that delivers incidents to Argus is known in Argus as a source system. Regardless of whether glue service software exists for your system, or you need to write your own, you must make Argus aware of this source system. This is accomplished in the Admin interface of the Argus API server, reachable at https://your-argus-server-here/admin/. Here you need to

  • Add a new Source System

    1. Select an identifiable name for this source system. For web based systems, it is common to use the FQDN of the web service here.

    2. Select a system type, creating a new one if necessary. The only significance of this at the moment is the ability to categorize multiple instances of the same software type.

    3. For source systems that are reachable via a web URL, you can add a base URL. All relative URLs referenced in incidents posted by this source system will have this base URL prefixed.

    4. Optionally, select a username for this system’s system user in Argus. If left blank, Argus will use the system name you entered in the first field.

    5. Save the new source system.

  • Create a new API authentication token for the new source system

    1. Select Add under the Auth token section in the admin interface.

    2. Find the system user that was created for your source system in the User dropdown and click the plus sign.

    3. Make note of the long hexadecimal token that was generated. You will need this when configuring Argus API access in your glue service. Any incident posted to the Argus API using this token will be associated with this source system. Keep the token a secret!