Digital Integration Management - what's new ?

[Bruno De Graeve]

In a previous post, I wrote about Application Interface Governance (AIG), a custom ServiceNow app I built to fill some product capability gaps around tracking integrations and interfaces. Have you seen that ServiceNow recently came with an ootb solution which will make AIG obsolete? This new functionality is part of the Application Portfolio Management (APM) suite.

In February we released the Digital Integration Management functionality which is also integrated with the newly released Enterprise Architecture Workspace and compatible with your Tokyo or Utah release.

Use case covered with the Digital Integration Management solution:

"Enterprise Architects, Business Application Owners and Solution Architects need visibility to integrations between Business Applications.

1. The increasing commoditization of applications and promotion of microservices architectures has resulted large increase in the number of applications and proliferation in how they integrate that’s difficult to understand and manage at scale.
2. With little to no governance to connect applications, and lack of documentation to track how and why these Applications interact, production issues are hard to troubleshoot and the pace of change grinds to a halt while potential impacts are chased down.
3. IT organizations need a better approach to understand integrations required given data sovereignty rules, and new legislation being passed requiring organizations to track and manage information flow across their organizations and externally.
4. Declaration and governance over the use of Interfaces can be of great benefit for SecOps teams who are concerned about API attacks for both API’s that are internal or externally facing."

Technically, the plugin will introduce the following main objects: Digital Interface and Digital Integration, and relations to Artifacts and Information Objects.

Digital Interface:

• Digital Interface are usually provided by a Business Application, but can also stand on their own (for examples in cases of serverless architecture). It's a high-level description of any kind of Application Interface (API) such as REST API, file-based integration or database connection (f.i. JDBC).
• Provides a way for other Business Applications to interact with the Business Application that provides the Interface
• Contains Meta data about the interface including: Name, Version, owners, protocol, lifecycle state/stage and more.
• Contains a list of all the integrations that are using this interface

Digital Integration:

• Represent the integrations between 2 Business Applications.
• In a typical scenario there would be a consuming Business Application, a provider Business Application, and an interface that is provided by the provider Business Application.
• Contains meta data on the integration including: name, version, type, data flow direction, Middleware used, owners, lifecycle state/stage and more.

Key Features of the solution:

• Relate business applications through digital integration
• Manage integrations effectively
• Create interfaces for integrations
• Request for new integrations and interfaces via the Catalog
• Approve or reject integrations

In this first stage, the focus is on the Design aspect of Digital Interfaces (high level description of any sort of application interface - API) and the Digital Integrations.

Initially our focus is on describing why two Business Applications exchange data with each other, which Information Objects are in scope and which related Architecture Artifacts are available. Because these two objects are intended to assist business application owners, enterprise and solution architects in their design activities, they are not considered as Configuration Items (CIs) and will not be available to be used in any of the ITSM processes; similar as Business Applications are not referenced in Incidents, Problems or Changes.

To quote Scott Lemm, there will be tables within the CMDB that will be introduced in the near future to represent the Operational aspects of these interfaces. These tables will support the operational configurations of standalone API's as well as API services. The design is currently being tested.

For those looking for objects to utilize within ITSM's Incident, Problem & Change, you will want to use the API Classes that will be released to the CMDB.

For those looking for data objects to utilize within APM and capture the design details of a Business Application and how it relates to other Business Applications, you will want to learn more about the features mentioned above. Digital Integration Management is now available in the ServiceNow Store. YES !