Purpose of the Workflow:  Integrate SevOne devices and metadata with ServiceNow CIs and attributes (bidirectional)

Description: the four IBM Rapid Network Automation workflows shared on this post will allow us to integrate completely SevOne with ServiceNow in terms of devices/CIs and metadata attributes.

Nowadays, companies have multiple tools that contain similar information, for example monitoring tools, inventory tools having the same devices. Therefore most of the companies decide to have a 'single source of truth' where they keep the 'most updated' list of network elements, so other tools can copy the information from there. However keeping an up to date list of network elements can be tricky and may required a lot of effort. 

Integration between different tools will help us automating the discovery process of new network elements, and with the automatic onboarding of those devices in the different tools that are used in our company.

Tools like SevOne can discover the network, keep an accurate list of devices and send that list of new devices to other tools like ServiceNow that could be used a the 'single source of truth' for the network. In other situations it might be ServiceNow where new devices are onboarded, and then that information is automatically sent to the other tools where those devices need to be added (for instance SevOne).

There is other type of data that should be shared between tools, data such as serial numbers, locations, owners, priority... This information also needs to be stored in the single source of truth tool and replicated on the rest of management tools.

In the document attached to these blog post there are four RNA workflows:

• Sync ServiceNow CIs with SevOne: we onboard in SevOne devices that are in ServiceNow

• Sync SevOne Devices with ServiceNow: we send to ServiceNow the list of devices monitored in SevOne and add them to the cmdb_ci_ip_device table

• Sync ServiceNow properties with SevOne metadata: we create/update SevOne metadata attributes on devices based on the attributes available in ServiceNow

• Sync SevOne metadata with ServiceNow properties: we update the value of some ServiceNow attributes based on the value of that metadata attribute in SevOne

List of requirements:

Rapid Network Automation Version: 1.1 or newer

SevOne Version: 6.6.0 or newer

ServiceNow: tested with Vancouver version, but it's possible that works in older versions

Environment Required:

NMS Credentials

ServiceNow Credentials

Setup:

• Import workflow
• OPTIONAL: create job to run the workflow at a specific frequency (daily, weekly...)

Expected Results:

• Sync ServiceNow CIs with SevOne: devices with the 'monitor flag' on in ServiceNow to be imported into SevOne

• Sync SevOne Devices with ServiceNow: all devices in SevOne to be onboarded into ServiceNow on table cmdb_ci_ip_device

• Sync ServiceNow properties with SevOne metadata: all the attributes from the table cmdb_ci_ip_device to be imported into SevOne, including assigning the values of those attributes to the devices

• Sync SevOne metadata with ServiceNow properties: SevOne_ID and contact metadata from SevOne should appear in ServiceNow CIs. In this case we would need to update the dictionary first to make sure those two properties exist in ServiceNow