Cloudaware - ServiceNow Implementation Approaches

Due to limited discovery cloud asset discovery capabilities in ServiceNow, many customers choose to use Cloudaware CMDB to populate or enrich cloud resources in ServiceNow via Cloudaware. The list of objects discoverable by Cloudaware is available here.

To see how Cloudaware seamlessly integrates with ServiceNow in action, request a demo.

Decide On The Integration Approach

There are two approaches to integrating Cloudaware and ServiceNow - push and pull. These approaches have unique pros and cons. 

Push Approach

Using a push approach, responsibility for most of the integration work is in the Cloudaware corner. Cloudaware is responsible for pushing assets and configuration into ServiceNow in a timely manner. A customer’s main responsibility is to provide Cloudaware with access and define a custom class to contain Cloudaware data. Sample class definitions can be found here. The disadvantage of the push approach is the customer is now continually dependent on Cloudaware for any schema modifications in the custom Class. Should the customer want to change the frequency or the types of attributes that Cloudaware sends to ServiceNow, it will have to request such changes from Cloudaware. Cloudaware handles these requests with the same priority as all other customer-related service requests.

Pull Approach

Using a pull approach, responsibility for most of the integration work is in the customer corner. The customer pulls the data from Cloudaware inside ServiceNow scripts. The key advantage of this approach is complete customer autonomy in selecting all aspects of integration such as frequency, types of CIs, types of attributes, etc. The customer can pull and store Cloudaware data directly into existing classes. The disadvantage of the pull approach is the overwhelming amount of integration work that the customer needed to perform:

• Learn Cloudaware Bulk API

• Perform change detection

• Work with paginated data in Cloudaware

• Perform change detection

• Develop queries necessary to extract data from Cloudaware

Push Integration Steps 

1. Create a custom class in ServiceNow

2. Create a user for Cloudaware in ServiceNow

3. Grant API access to Cloudaware 

4. Grant access to the custom class and table to Cloudaware user

5. Configure credentials in Cloudaware admin panel (guide) 

6. Submit a service request to Cloudaware to activate push integration

7. Validate date

Pull Integration Steps 

1. Determine which types of CIs will be pulled from Cloudaware

2. Decide where in ServiceNow schema the data from Cloudaware will be stored

3. Download Cloudaware Enterprise WSDL and upload to ServiceNow (guide)

4. Develop Cloudaware SOQL queries for each type of CI resource

5. Create ServiceNow scripts to pull and paginate data from Cloudaware using SOAP messages

6. Insert the extracted data into desired location

7. Ensure change detection and data deletion is working