Receive Alerts from Google Cloud Monitoring with SAP Cloud Platform Alert Notification

Would you prefer to receive the information about your Google Cloud Platform resources the same way you do it in SAP Cloud Platform? Have you already configured convenient channels to receive alerts and notifications in SAP Cloud Platform Alert Notification? And would you like to reuse them for the various services and applications you operate in your cloud-native or hybrid solution?  

Today you’ll see how easy it is to get the alerts triggered by Google Cloud Monitoring through the channels configured in SAP Cloud Platform Alert Notification. For this purpose we will use a simple cloud application and its uptime check. Once the application is detected to be down, we will receive an alert in Microsoft Teams and also an incident in ServiceNow will be opened. Further with the recovery of the uptime check, another Microsoft Teams message will be delivered and the ServiceNow incident will be automatically closed. 

As a prerequisite to start, you need to have: 

• An active GCP account;
• An active subscription or license for SAP Cloud Platform Alert Notification;
• An application running in cloud environment;
• (optional) ServiceNow instance;
• (optional) Microsoft Teams channel.

Set up SAP Cloud Platform Alert Notification

Let’s make sure all the needed configuration in Alert Notification is done. Starting by the actions, we will reuse a couple of previously defined actions.

Note: Alternatively, you may configure any type of action offered by Alert Notification – as simple as sending an e-mail to a predefined address or more complicated like a Webhook action to post the alert to a custom or third party application transforming the request payload from the standard Alert Notification event format to the one expected by the receiving application. For more information regarding the various action types supported by SAP Cloud Platform Alert Notification and how to configure each of them, please visit the official documentation. 

Here are the actions we will use:

• one of type Microsoft Teams that will send us a message to the specified Microsoft Teams channel (see how to configure it to your Microsoft Teams channel):

• one of type ServiceNow Incident that will create, update and resolve incidents in our ServiceNow instance (see how to configure it for your ServiceNow instance):

Next, let’s subscribe for alerts coming from Google Cloud Monitoring. Navigate to your Alert Notification instance in SAP Cloud Platform Cockpit, select the Subscriptions menu and choose Create. At the first step of Create Subscription wizard set a name for your subscription and choose Create. At the Select Conditions step choose Create Condition. Enter a name for the new condition and Condition: eventType Is Equal To GoogleCloudOperationsNotification:

Choose Create and then Assign.

At Select Actions step select the prepared actions or create a new one and choose Assign:

Now you have a subscription that will catch all alerts and notifications coming from Google Cloud Monitoring and then will forward them both to Microsoft Teams as well as to ServiceNow.

As a final step in Alert Notification, we need to create a technical client that will be used to deliver the alerts from Google Cloud Monitoring to our Alert Notification service instance. For this purpose, a technical client with ALERT_WRITE permission of type BASIC shall be used. You can create one from the Service Keys menu, if you have a Cloud Foundry account, or from the Security menu – for Neo accounts:

• for Cloud Foundry, follow the steps described here

• for Neo, follow the steps described here

Now you have all the configurations you need in Alert Notification to be able to forward your alerts from GCP Monitoring to the desired communication channels and monitoring tools.

Set up Google Cloud Monitoring

Let’s proceed with configuring Google Cloud Monitoring to deliver alerts to SAP Cloud Platform Alert Notification. To achieve it, let’s follow the steps:

1. In the Google Cloud Console select Monitoring
2. In the Monitoring navigation pane verify that the correct Workspace is selected and choose Alerting
3. Select Edit Notification Channels at the top of the page
4. Scroll to the Webhooks section
5. Choose Add New
6. Enter Endpoint Url in Add Static Webhook popup in accordance to your SAP Cloud environment:
   • for your Cloud Foundry Alert Notification service instance – enter the Url supplied with your Service Key, followed by /cf/producer/v1/resource-events? schema_definition=gcp_operations&version=1.2, e.g.:

     https://clm-sl-ans-live-ans-service-api.cfapps.eu10.hana.ondemand.com/cf/producer/v1/resource-events?schema_definition=gcp_operations&version=1.2

   • for Neo accounts – use the Event Producer URL shown at Security page when you navigate to Alert Notification service in SAP Cloud Platform Cockpit, with a similar ending, e.g.:

     https://clm-sl-ans-live-ans-service-api.cfapps.eu10.hana.ondemand.com/neo/producer/v1/resource-events?schema_definition=gcp_operations&version=1.2

7. Enter some Display Name for your new notification channel, e.g. SAP CP Alert Notification
8. Select the Use HTTP Basic Auth option
9. Fill in the Auth Username and Auth Password using the ones received when you previously created the Service Key/Technical Client in the SAP Cloud Cockpit:
10. Make sure the channel is configured correctly by selecting Test Connection and then Save.

Now you are ready to use this Webhook notification channel in any Alerting Policy you’ve configured in your Google Cloud Monitoring.

Execute the scenario

Within this demo, we will use a simple Uptime check that checks the availability of our demo application. You could set up the Uptime check for any existing application of yours. For the purpose of the demo, we have used an already deployed application within SAP Cloud Platform – Cloud Foundry environment.

Once, the Uptime check is configured, we could safely stop the application that it monitors. Within seconds, the following notification comes to our Microsoft Teams Support channel:

And also a newly created incident in our ServiceNow instance appears:

Now, let’s start our application. Up to minute later,  the following notification is received in Microsoft Teams:

And the corresponding incident in ServiceNow is automatically resolved:

For further information about the integration scenario between Google Cloud Monitoring and SAP Cloud Platform Alert Notification, check the SAP Help Portal page.

This blog post is part of a series of blog posts related to integration between third-party monitoring tools and SAP Cloud Platform Alert Notification service. We will continuously add newly released integrations to the series, so stay tuned!

We ask you – our customers and partners – to join us in our integration journey! Tell us what you use for monitoring solutions, what you need to integrate with them; tell us your experience, and what your alerting needs are!