Type of Service Account needed for ingesting ServiceNow data into Microsoft Fabric

[BalS]

I need to figure out the type of Service Account needed for ingesting ServiceNow data into Microsoft Fabric please.

Thank you, Bal.

[SANDEEP DUTTA]

Hi @BalS ,

Microsoft Fabric brings together a broad spectrum of data analytics capabilities into a unified, end-to-end platform for data storage, processing, and analysis. Within this ecosystem, the eventstreams feature plays a critical role in enabling real-time analytics, offering a scalable, Kafka-compatible interface for seamless ingestion and processing of streaming data.

Stream Connect enables ServiceNow to natively consume and produce Kafka events — no middleware required. You can define consumers and producers to directly map events to actions and responses in the Now Platform. Stream Connect is the solution from ServiceNow that gives customers access to Kafka end points.  Unlike traditional APIs that rely on frequent polling or complex webhook setups, Kafka enables ServiceNow to consume events in real time with low latency and high scalability. Because both Microsoft Eventstreams and ServiceNow support the native Kafka protocol, the integration is seamless, efficient, and ideal for high-throughput, event-driven architectures.

Please refer this beautiful article :

https://www.servicenow.com/community/workflow-data-fabric-articles/integrating-servicenow-with-real-...

[BalS]

Thank you @SANDEEP DUTTA ,
We are also exploring the RTI option you mentioned above as a separate exercise in addition to ingesting periodic data via the Microsoft Fabric data pipeline hence need to confirm what is the best Service Account type for that scenario. Thanks for pointing to RTI article and that is really great article by @quentincarton .

[SANDEEP DUTTA]

Hi @BalS ,

For services hosted in Azure, we recommend using a managed identity if possible, and a service principal if not. Managed identities can't be used for services hosted outside of Azure. In that case, we recommend a service principal. If you can use a managed identity or a service principal, do so. We recommend that you not use a Microsoft Entra user account as a service account. See the following table for a summary.

Expand table

Service hosting	Managed identity	Service principal	Azure user account
Service is hosted in Azure.	Yes. Recommended if the service supports a Managed Identity.	Yes.	Not recommended.
Service is not hosted in Azure.	No	Yes. Recommended.	Not recommended.
Service is multi-tenant	No	Yes. Recommended.	No.

[BalS]

We were able to setup a data pipeline into Microsoft Fabric using the OOTB ServiceNow connector in Fabric and had to create a service account user with Web Only access in ServiceNow to authenticate the flow of data from SNOW to MS Fabric.

The limitation is that it only sees raw data tables (that I know of as yet).