# ServiceNow Integration

ServiceNow offers a cloud-based solution that connects and unifies an organization with digitalization, allowing users to make their work easier and smoother. One of the offerings of ServiceNow is the Engineering License Management through integration with various companies providing similar capabilities.

Open iT utilizes this integration to give customers more flexibility and high-level reporting and analysis. Open iT combines its detailed license usage insights with ServiceNow's cost tracking and entitlement management, enabling organizations to gain a unified view of their licensing landscape, identify potential savings, and automate tasks to optimize software usage.

Additionally, ServiceNow's integration with Open iT enhances compliance monitoring, allowing organizations to assess over-licensed or underutilized software more effectively.

# Infrastructure

The following diagram shows the general data flow of the Open iT integration with ServiceNow.

# Components

The integration has three major components: Open iT Share Software Assets Directory (SSAD), Open iT LicenseAnalyzer (ServiceNow Store Application), and ServiceNow Adapter.

# Open iT Shared Software Assets Directory (SSAD)

The Open iT Shared Software Assets Directory (SSAD) is a central repository for software information and its normalized format. It plays a crucial role in Open iT’s ServiceNow integration by automatically distributing a standard software catalog for data normalization that ensures report accuracy in the ServiceNow for Engineering Dashboard.

SSAD is hosted in the Open iT Customer Portal. The customer’s Open iT Core Server communicates with the Customer Portal through the SSAD connector application in the Core Server. The primary job of this application is to:

1. Establish the connection between the Core Server and the Customer Portal.

2. Extract and then push data from the Core Server, which will be used to query the SSAD database for the normalized data.

   The Core Server initially identifies the customer's data using the collected LicPoll, application, and inventory data. These data are used to create the query information as the following standard data types which can be reported under the LicenseAnalyzer – Level 0 (Inventory) module:

   • (142) Software Catalog Query Info
   • (148) Software Catalog Query WinApp
   
   

   These data types can be generated every five (5) hours when the scheduled job to process all data runs. You can trigger this job on demand in the Core Server's Job Runner interface.

3. Download and save the following files:

   • Mapping files for normalizing data. After matching the customer's data, the SSAD database returns mapping files to the Core Server.
     
     Featureset mapping files are saved in the Catalog folder of Core Server's configuration directory following the format, $CONFIG_DIR/Catalog/<License Manager>/<Vendor Daemon>/featureset.map.
     
     Both feature-to-software-catalog-id-.map (one-to-one feature) and application-to-software-catalog-id.map (Windows application) files are saved in the Core Server's configuration directory.
     

     In the directory syntax for featureset.map files, since not all license managers have a vendor daemon, the license manager name will also serve as the daemon name.

   • SSAD.json file. The Analysis Server uses this file to properly match Open iT's software names with ServiceNow's software catalog definitions.

   • unmatched.json file. This contains a record of the customer’s data not matching the SSAD database.

Core Server uses the mapping files from SSAD to produce the following data types with normalized data:

• (143) Normalized License Total Concurrency
• (144) Normalized License User Host Concurrency
• (145) Normalized License Maxed Out
• (147) Normalized License Usergroup Concurrency
• (149) Normalized Windows Total Concurrency
• (150) Normalized Windows Usergroup Concurrency
• (151) Normalized Windows User Host Concurrency

These data types can be reported under the LicenseAnalyzer – Level 1 (Runtime Usage) module and are loaded to the Open iT Analysis Server by default.

# Open iT LicenseAnalyzer (ServiceNow Store Application)

Open iT LicenseAnalyzer is a published application in the ServiceNow Store Application. This resides in the ServiceNow instance and is used for authentication, receiving data from Open iT, creating and deploying Import Sets, and data transformation, making it compatible to the SAM tables of ServiceNow.

# ServiceNow Adapter

The ServiceNow Adapter is a plug-in or extension of the Open iT Analysis Server used for fetching data from the Open iT SQL database, processing the data to make it compatible with ServiceNow and pushing the data using the REST API provided by the ServiceNow instance.