# 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 offering the same manner. Open iT utilizes this integration to give customers more flexibility and high-level reporting and analysis.

# 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 inventory 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 data. These data are used to create the query information as a standard data type called (142) Software Catalog Query Info that can be reported under the LicenseAnalyzer – Level 0 (Inventory) module.

   Like any other data type, data type 142 is 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 inventory data, the SSAD database returns featureset.map and feature.map files to the Core Server. These mapping files are saved in the Catalog folder in Core Server's configuration directory following the format: $CONFIG_DIR/Catalog/<License Manager>/<Vendor Daemon>/<Map File>.
     

     In the directory syntax, 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 three (3) data types with normalized data:

• (143) Normalized License Total Concurrency
• (144) Normalized License User Host Concurrency
• (145) Normalized License Maxed Out

These data types can also be reported under the LicenseAnalyzer – Level 1 (Runtime Usage) module. Moreover, data types 143, 144, and 145 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.