[Zenoss-dev] Adding free form text field to Event Console?

[Chet Luther]

On Feb 29, 2008, at 9:10 AM, mikez wrote:

> I've checked through Zenoss' docs, searched through the user & dev  
> forums and the dev tickets for an answer to my question, but I'm  
> (obviously) new to Zenoss and the forums so apologies if this was  
> answered elsewhere.
>
> What I'm looking for is a way to add a field to the Event Console  
> which would allow users to enter a dozen or so characters of text  
> for a given event - we'd use this to keep track of which tickets are  
> opened for outages/issues. Is there a way to do this with Zenoss out  
> of the box? If not, what would be needed to changed to make this  
> possible?
>
> It's been suggested that one could use the 'log messages' function  
> in the event's detailed information. My concern with using the log  
> message is that it isn't in the main face of the event console. I  
> work in an operations center that monitors a very large network, and  
> we need to be able to see at a glance which alerts have trouble  
> tickets associated with them and if so what that ticket number is.  
> Checking the log message involves clicking through a couple of  
> windows. Also, having this 'trouble ticket' field in the console  
> face would allow you sort the alerts based on which had tickets open  
> on them and which didn't.

Adding another field would be a matter of altering the status and  
history tables and the trigger that moves events from one to the  
other. This is very core functionality and couldn't be wrapped up into  
a ZenPack, so you'd have to worry about it everytime you did an upgrade.

I just noticed that there is already a 36 character field available  
right now called "suppid" that from my initial investigation appears  
to be completely unused within the system currently. You could use  
this field for your ticket number and include it on your event console  
by going to Event Manager's Fields tab and choosing it for the default  
result fields.