Ansible Automation Platform and ServiceNow ITSM Integration

13 août 2024Martin Jackson

Automation has enabled and empowered a generational shift in the technology industry, and has delivered more reliable, dynamic systems with faster change rates than were previously thought possible.

At the same time, these change rates pose new challenges for keeping track of assets and states. Many organizations have explicit audit obligations and separation of duties requirements, and it makes sense for them to have a centralized workflow and asset tracking system to help meet these requirements.

There are immense benefits to enabling integrations between automation systems and these centralized systems of record, and this is why we have provided our Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and ServiceNow ITSM integration–to simplify the process of using the systems together. In this blog, I'll highlight how these integrations work together and provide updates on some recent enhancements.

Ansible Automation Platform provides three distinct integrations for ServiceNow ITSM:

servicenow.itsm Certified Collection. This is a Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection that allows various ways to interact with ServiceNow instances and data. It is available via Ansible Galaxy and Ansible automation hub.
API for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform Certified Content Collection. This is an application available free of charge through the ServiceNow store. It exists to provide seamless access to ServiceNow workflows when this cannot be done through the REST API alone.
Event-Driven Ansible Notification Service. This is also a ServiceNow store application that allows direct integration with Event-Driven Ansible via a webhook.

Ways to use Ansible Automation Platform and ServiceNow integrations

As a user, you have several options if you want to use the Ansible Automation Platform and ServiceNow integrations. These options are not exclusive - you can use as much or as little of the functionality as it suits your needs.

ServiceNow as a data source (read-only)

The servicenow.itsm collection includes an inventory plugin which can use ServiceNow as an Ansible inventory source so that Ansible workflows can target servers, groups of servers and endpoints using facts that are stored directly in ServiceNow. This plugin is tested to scale to 10,000+ inventory items. We recently added caching capabilities to the inventory plugin, which will make inventory syncs faster, and will be especially beneficial for larger inventories. Additionally, we improved the performance of queries that might return duplicate records to make the inventory experience better for large fleets.

Example inventory configuration:

---
plugin: servicenow.itsm.now
table: cmdb_ci_ec2_instance
strict: false
cache: True
cache_plugin: ansible.builtin.jsonfile
cache_timeout: 3600
cache_connection: /tmp/cache
cache_prefix: now
columns:
  - sys_id
  - name
  - fqdn
sysparm_query: nameSTARTSWITHmy-vm-

You can also use any of the other service modules to query ServiceNow objects (such as Problems, Incidents, or Service Requests, for example). This does not require write access to ServiceNow.

Ansible Automation Platform participates in ServiceNow workflows (read-write)

Another way to use Ansible Automation Platform with ServiceNow is to have it create, update, and delete ServiceNow ITSM records. There is explicit support in the servicenow.itsm collection for the following object types:

Change Request (including Change Request Tasks)
Configuration Items (including relationships)
Incident
Problem (including Problem Tasks)
Service Catalog
Attachments

Due to changes in the Problem API, we developed the API for Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection application. You will need to install this in your ServiceNow instance for full support of the Problem API.

Additionally, as of version 2.5.0, we have added “generic” support, which means servicenow.itsm can be used with any REST-supported object.

Any of these objects can be read, created, updated or deleted through the collection. So an Ansible workflow might be constructed to see an Incident, do some discovery against the Configuration Item the Incident references, and record that information in the Incident.

A great example of this is Ikea. Ikea presented on how they are integrating Ansible Automation Platform with ServiceNow at AnsibleFest 2024:

Ansible Automation Platform reacts to ServiceNow events with Event-Driven Ansible

With the introduction of Event-Driven Ansible in Ansible Automation Platform 2.4, you have the ability to configure ServiceNow to send events to Ansible Automation Platform via a webhook, either directly or through a “mid” server.

The Event-Driven Ansible notification service app currently supports these tables and event types:

The event rulebook in Ansible Automation Platform can use the servicenow.itsm collection and other content to react appropriately to these events.

Recently, Nestle gave a presentation on how they are using Event-Driven Ansible to instrument Ansible cluster failovers without human intervention.

ServiceNow enhancements

We have certified both the Event-Driven Ansible notification service and the API for Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection for the ServiceNow releases code-named Utah, Vancouver and Washington DC. We will continue to certify these apps, as well as the servicenow.itsm collection, for new releases of ServiceNow as they become generally available.

Summary

Ansible Automation Platform’s integrations with ServiceNow exist to make it easier to use both systems; to accomplish the goal to use ServiceNow inventory in Ansible Automation Platform, to enrich ServiceNow records with information Ansible workflows can provide and to have Ansible Automation Platform react to events generated by ServiceNow. We are continuing to invest in our ServiceNow integrations, and are committed to maintaining and supporting these capabilities for our users and customers.