Friday, December 6, 2013

Netcool/Impact and ServiceNow! integration

Have you ever tried to integrate Netcool/Impact and ServiceNow! ?
ServiceNow!... It's an interesting piece of software I must admit and it's in a public cloud, in Internet. You can create a lot of customizations and your own project and applications like CMDB, incident management, problem management, probably marketing people from SN! would tell you more benefits.
I've had a need to integrate my Impact 6.1.1 with SN! via SOAP recently and just wanted to share few general tips.
1. SN! WSDLs seem to be not correctly generated for Axis2 and must be manually adjusted before you approach compiling them in Netcool/Impact, I basically go and open my WSDL, I visit every complextType entry and remove the name parameter and value, so I leave <complextType> only. Only with this your WSDL will compile in nci_compilewsdl. Thank you Yasser from Impact dev team to pointing me to that one! :-)
2. SN! CA-signed certificate must be imported to your ImpactProfile WAS. It's Entrust Inc. And here's the full instruction for Impact: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21592616
3. You've got a basic HTTP authentication in SN! and probably won't be allowed to switch it off, then compilation of WSDL is possible only locally with a downloaded WSDL file (both from CLI and GUI).
4. Policy generated by wizard is good and works well, usually a single parameter being selected helps it working better since the beginning (so you generate WSParams variable correctly).
The documentation of SN! in wiki is pretty well however not everything is documented and beware of your version of ServiceNow!
Everything else depends on your needs, if this is incident management integration (opening tickets) or CMDB (importing service trees to TBSM).
That would be it. I'll share more after I finish my integration with TBSM.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

We are starting down this path of intergrations with SN and IMPACT 6.1.
Did you enrich data thru SN? Did you pull all data from the SN clould and populate the TBSM trees?

Focus Group said...

This is an intresting blog that you have posted, you shares a lot of things about Service Management System, Business Service Management and Servicenow Problem Management. Which are very informative for us. Thanks

Unknown said...

Do you finish the integration with ServiceNow and TBSM ?

Marcin said...

I'm terribly sorry for not responding until today. My last year was very intensive and I had limited or no time for activities like running my blog. I just didn't read what's coming to comments. But I answer right now:
I haven't finished the SN! integration yet, but I do have some satisfactory results.

To answer Bruce - yes I populate TBSM service trees via SOAP connection to SN! and SCR API connection to TBSM SCR database/XMLtoolkit facility. I started with calling TBSMShell from Impact, but eventually switched to SCR API for "refresh" capability (TBSMShell doesn't have a "modify" function).

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