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. For a complete gap analysis of discoverable objects in ServiceNow vs. Cloudaware click here.
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 chang detection
Develop queries necessary to extract data from Cloudaware
Push Integration Steps
Create a custom class in ServiceNow
Create a user for Cloudaware in ServiceNow
Grant API access to Cloudaware
Grant access to the custom class and table to Cloudaware user
Configure credentials in Cloudaware admin panel (Guide)
Submit a service request to Cloudaware to activate push integration
Validate date
Pull Integration Steps
Determine which types of CIs will be pulled from Cloudaware
Decide where in ServiceNow schema the data from Cloudaware will be stored
Download Cloudaware Enterprise WSDL and upload to ServiceNow (Guide)
Develop Cloudaware SOQL queries for each type of CI resource
Create ServiceNow scripts to pull and paginate data from Cloudaware using SOAP messages
Insert the extracted data into desired location
Ensure change detection and data deletion is working