Zendesk Notifications for PRTG

Get PRTG notifications when new / unassigned tickets are detected.

Pre-requisites:

• Linux-based server to run the Python script. May work running from PRTG/probe machine, but since I prefer to administer my scripting environment with Linux, this was only tested on a Debian machine.

How it Works

• The Python script (zendesk_notifier) gets ran on a schedule and checks your Zendesk account for new / unassigned tickets. When a condition is met (new / unassigned tickets), it sends a hook to PRTG and an alert notification gets pushed to your PRTG dashboard.

Dependencies (required!)

requests - You can obtain it from apt (Debian/Ubuntu) or Pip/pip3 (any environment)

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt update && apt install python3-requests

Any: pip3 install requests (no root/sudo) - if you don't yet have pip, install it. (Installation varies by operating system type)

Preliminary Setup

Get your Zendesk API token, so you aren't hardcoding a password in your script.

• Login to Zendesk
• Go to Admin (wheel icon) > Scroll to Channels > API
• Make sure Token Access is toggled to ON/Enabled
• Just beneath the toggle, there's a light-grey + -- click it
• For API Token Description, enter: PRTG Unassigned Notification
• Copy the API key just beneath that, it will be used in the script (and won't be displayed by Zendesk, again!)

Setup

1. Add Zendesk as a Device Object, if you haven't already

Devices > Add New Device > Enter your Zendesk subdomain URL

2. Once the device object is added, create a new sensor:

• Click the + sign in the sensor box > Add Sensor > Search for HTTP Push Data Advanced & populate options as follows:
  • Sensor Name: Tickets
  • SSL Settings: HTTPS
  • SSL Port: 5051
  • Request Method: POST
  • Identification Token: [Leave default, for now]
  • No Incoming Data: Ignore and keep last status (if you choose other options, you'll need to sync the cron frequency with the scanning frequency.. ignore is the easiest option!)
• CREATE

3. Now, click on "Tickets" and click "Settings" just above - grab the Identification Token and put it in the script's config for PRTG_TOKEN

4. RUN zendesk_notifier via CLI: /path/to/zendesk_notifier or ./zendesk_notifier (if your terminal is already focused in the git directory) to create the sensor

5. Go into the channel settings (click the wheel icons) and set your thresholds:

   • Unit: ticket(s)
   • Scaling Multiplication: 1
   • Scaling Division: 1
   • Enable alerting based on limits
   • Upper Error Limit: 2
   • Lower Warning Limit: 0.2 (It didn't register as a warning with 1 - not yet sure if its a bug with the script, or PRTG)

6. Set up the cron on the Linux-based server; as a non-root user, run: crontab -e and add the following line:

*/5 7-19 * * 1-6 /usr/bin/python3 /path/to/zendesk-notifier/zendesk_notifier >/dev/null 2>&1

Replace /path/to/ with the location of zendesk_notifier and /usr/bin/python3 (the latter being identical on Linux-based machines) on your system.

Adjust the cron time to suit:

Ordered left to right in the crontab. */5 = every 5 minutes

7-19 = run between 7am and 7pm

* = every day of the month

* = every month

1-6 = Monday - Saturday (Sunday would be 0)

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Testing

Run a curl command via CLI / a command-line interface:

curl https://YOUR_USERNAME.zendesk.com/api/v2/search.json?query=assignee:none \
-v -u youragent@example.com /token:fFdfjkrySdoFSFaufsd....MKfisUDYgsd

Replace the string/line after token: with your API token, obtained from your Zendesk admin.

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Customizing

If you want to pull tickets other than those that are unassigned, you can alter the search query. Instead of assignee:none, pick another query from the API documentation and modify the script to suit your needs.

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Log Cleanup (optional)

Note that if you opt to run this every frequently, you may want to consider blocking cron (or the script) from /var/log/syslog, else you'll see such spamming:

Jan 10 21:46:01 angela CRON[2331]: (angela) CMD (/usr/bin/python3 /home/angela/zendesk-notifier/zendesk_notifier)

If you want to simply direct cron messages to their own log and not delete them entirely (which is what my example below will do), specify so in /etc/rsyslog.conf

To squash this useless logging, you can run (optional):

pico /etc/rsyslog.conf

Find the line:

*.*;auth,authpriv.none             -/var/log/syslog

Append cron, like so:

*.*;cron,auth,authpriv.none             -/var/log/syslog

Restart rsyslog:

service rsyslog restart

Troubleshooting

You can run the script manually via CLI by just running the path in the terminal.

You can also omit >/dev/null 2>&1 from the cron to have the debug output sent to /var/mail/youruser or to your cron/system default email.