Integrating Hobbit with Ticketing system(s) / Feature Request

[Charles Jones]

Some time ago (years actually), I integrated Big Brother with "Request 
Tracker", which is a popular open source helpdesk ticketing system. This 
was done by CCing hobbit alerts to the ticketing system, and the 
creation of a custom plugin that parsed the incoming mails and 
automatically created a ticket for red alerts. The plugin was "smart" 
enough so that when a recovery message arrived, it would auto-resolve 
the initial ticket created from the first alert.

I am now looking again at integrating Hobbit with a ticketing system, 
but this time with "Jira" (http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/).  
Jira has a very useful API as well as an RCP/SOAP interface, so doing 
something similar to what I did with RT should be relatively simple.

However, in going over the code in my head (I havn't written it yet), I 
see a problem.  I believe that Hobbit is different from BB in that 
recovery pages are not sent with an ID (and I think if you forced it 
with a script the ID is "-1") which makes it impossible to relate them 
to the origional alert.  Is there any simple way that we could have 
access to this ID number, or does Hobbit simply not track it?

Otherwise I may have to do something like query hobbitboard and look for 
a hostname.service that matches the resolved message, and I'd rather not 
do that as it will just slow things down and add extra complexity.

-Charles