What is it?

Well, intros don’t have to be long, nor do they have to be hard. But they do have to exist. Let’s take a look on how to integrate ServiceNow with Solarwinds NPM. ServiceNow integration with Solarwinds NPM provides closed- loop network management and IT process automation in a single point. This integration will automate ServiceNow incident creation and Solarwinds alert acknowledgement. The capability of Solarwinds to send email notification or http post request and web service API provided by Orion helps to achieve this integration. And of course everyone knows that ServiceNow supports many ways of integration among which email processing, http processor and outbound SOAP messages will be used in this integration.

Why Solarwinds?

It is a common Enterprise monitoring solution, which provides a framework to monitor network, application through the Solarwinds Orion Web Interface. It is highly capable, easy to use and quick to implement.

Why to Integrate?

Integration always helps to automate things and to reduce manual works. Organisations using two different tools for monitoring and incident tracking often ends up with the manual work of creating incidents when alert triggered and updating notes on both tools. By integrating monitoring systems and ServiceNow incident management application, it provides an effective way to eliminate the creation of bogus tickets in the service desk and reduces manual work which in turn saves time and cost.

How to Integrate?

Solarwinds has the capability of triggering an email or sending an http post request when an alert is created. ServiceNow can process these emails using inbound email actions or it can process the http post request using Processors to create new incident. Body of the email / http post can be customized in NPM based on our needs. Using http post is preferred as we will always have some delay in sending / receiving emails.

Once NPM raised an alert, it is important to acknowledge that else we will receive bunch of alerts until it gets resolved. Acknowledging an alert can be achieved from ServiceNow itself as it has the capability to call any published web service. Solarwinds Orion SDK supports both SOAP and REST protocol which can be used to acknowledge an alert from ServiceNow. Solarwinds web service API provides function to do database operations like query, insert, update and delete on NPM tables.