6.6 ServiceNow Integration - BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance - 25.2.0

BlueCat LiveAssurance User Guide
ft:locale
en-US
Product name
BlueCat Infrastructure Assurance
Version
25.2.0
ServiceNow is a Software-as-a-Service provider of IT service management software. LiveAssurance integrates natively with ServiceNow (API integration) to automate the creation of incident tickets in response to issues. With the ServiceNow integration, you can capture incidents using your ServiceNow ticketing system to notify your operations team to resolve issues in your infrastructure.
Note:
  • LiveAssurance does not integrate with ServiceNow on-prem offerings.
  • LiveAssurance integrates with ServiceNow Kingston or later releases.

Prerequisites

A few steps are required before you can set up the integration with ServiceNow:

  1. Gather the instance ID and URL of the ServiceNow instance.

  2. Create a new user in ServiceNow for LiveAssurance to communicate with ServiceNow via REST API.

  3. Collect the user ID and credential information. You will need this information for the setup.

    Consider creating a new user as the reporter of the incident ticket. This will be the “caller” field on the ServiceNow form.

    Communication between the LiveAssurance server and the ServiceNow instance uses HTTPS port 443.

    Note: ServiceNow Incident Management is a cloud-based solution. You may be accessing the ServiceNow instance through an HTTP proxy. Similarly, the LiveAssurance server may be situated behind a HTTP proxy.
  4. In the ServiceNow integration setup, you have the option to select either basic authentication using login credentials or OAuth2 authorization. For OAuth2, you must create an OAuth application endpoint for the LiveAssurance client application to access the ServiceNow instance.
    Note: ServiceNow admin role is required for this task.
    Refer to the ServiceNow documentation for more details (documentation for the ServiceNow Orlando release).

    From ServiceNow, navigate to System OAuth > Application Registry, then click New. On the Interceptor page, click Create an OAuth API endpoint for external clients and configure the fields, as described below.

    The following image shows an example.

    • Name—Enter a friendly name such as indeni-rcdemo1 to identify the client application.
    • Client ID—ServiceNow automatically generates a unique Client ID for each client application.
    • Client Secret —The shared secret string that both ServiceNow and LiveAssurance use to authorize communications with each other. Leave the field blank and ServiceNow will automatically generate a client secret.
      Note: Copy the Client ID and the Client Secret as you will need to enter this information for the ServiceNow integration setup.
    • Redirect URL—Enter the redirect URL https://<indeni server>/api/v1/oauth/service-now/callback. This URL can be found from the ServiceNow integration configuration window in the LiveAssurance UI (Settings > Integrations > Add New Integration > ServiceNow).

      The following image shows an example of the ServiceNow integration window, with the redirect URL highlighted.

ServiceNow Setup

  1. From the LiveAssurance UI, select the Settings tab in the sidebar, then select Integrations.

  2. Select Add New Integration > ServiceNow.

    The ServiceNow integration window opens.

  3. Under Authentication, configure the following:

    • Integration Name—Enter a unique name for the integration.
    • Instance Name—Enter the ServiceNow instance name (unique identifier).
    • Portal URL—Enter the URL of the ServiceNow portal.
    • Selet either Basic or OAuth 2.0 as the authentication type that LiveAssurance uses to authenticate with ServiceNow. For basic authentication, enter the Username and Password. Alternatively, for OAuth 2.0, enter the Client ID and Client Secret.
    • Additional configuration options—Starting in v25.1.0, LiveAssurance supports the following configuration options that allow you to ensure that the correct Configuration Management Database (CMDB) configuration item (CI) is populated automatically in the ServiceNow incidents. If you wish to configure these additional options, ensure that you configure them all as described below:
      • From Table—Specify the ServiceNow table which stores the CI you want to query. ServiceNow will reference this table to retireve CI data.
      • Config Item—Specify the unique CI identifier that represents the CI linked to the alerts.
      • Payload Field—Specify the field in the JSON payload that will contain the CI details. Based on the payload data sent to ServiceNow, the specified CI will be automatically populated in the created tickets.

      For example, to populate the Config Item field:

      As shown in the following image, if the From Table field is set to cmdb_ci, the Config Item field is set to sys_id, and the Payload Field is set to cmdb_ci, the sys_id (that is, the ID of a device in ServiceNow) will be retreived from the cmdb_ci table and included in the request (for example, "cmdb_ci": "85f6af451b09b05058e30e94604bcbd0"). When viewing the incident in ServiceNow, the linked device will be associated using the sys_id.

  4. To verify the details before proceeding, click the TEST button.

    If the communication was successful, the user who is the resource owner will be prompted to authorize or deny the application access to their account. Essentially, the user must explicitly grant the LiveAssurance application access to the ServiceNow account.

    The following image shows an example of the authorization request from ServiceNow.

  5. Under Severities, configure the following:
    • Select the severity of issues for which you want LiveAssurance to automatically open an incident ticket. The available options are All, Critical, Error, Warning, Info.
    • Click the toggle button to specify if LiveAssurance should automatically archive the issue upon successful creation of an incident ticket.

    The following image shows an example of the Severities section, with only Critical and Error severities selected.

  6. Next, map LiveAssurance Severity to ServiceNow Impact.

    While LiveAssurance categorizes issues as critical, error, warning and information, ServiceNow supports three levels of impact the issue has on business—high, medium, and none.

    The following image shows an example of the mapping.

  7. Click Next to proceed to the Fields Mapping section.

  8. Under Fields Mapping, specify ServiceNow fields to be populated when a ticket is created.

    Creating a ticket effectively populates the ServiceNow incident form with information about the incident.

    The available fields are:

    • Caller—(mandatory field) Using a new userID for this field is recommended to identify LiveAssurance as the incident reporter.
    • Assigned To—(optional field) The user to whom the incident will be assigned.
    • Assignment Group—(optional field) The group who will be working on this incident.

  9. Once configured, LiveAssurance will begin detecting issues, it will create incident tickets critical, error, warning or information based on your configuration.

    Upon successful creation of an incident, ServiceNow responds with a ticket number to LiveAssurance. This ticket number is added to the NOTES Section.