Populating the CMDB - Qualys integrations

[Sarah James]

Hi everyone,

I am looking for some advise and experience for those who have used or are exploring integrations with Qualys to populate their CMDB.  Seeking information to help us determine our best path forward for deciding between using:
- ServiceNow Service Graph connector for Qualys
- Qualys CMDB Sync Service Graph Connector

I am working with a customer who is at the start of their ServiceNow journey leveraging CMDB, CSDM and Discovery, and we are starting to explore how integrations (like Qualys) could help in situations for network segments with security controls where we cant get credentials. In this instance they have a lot of good data in Qualys about what is in their network. 

Requirement: As a CMDB admin, I need to populate the CMDB, specifically data for cis like servers where discovery doesnt have the creds, unable to use creds for particular network segments - unable to create or update some servers today due to credential limitations, so that I can automatically create and update the CMDB at this technical layer / reduce manual efforts and manual creation.

We started to test and leverage the one provided by Qualys but are not finding the experience as good as we were expecting. Have also reached out to ServiceNow but understand there arent any materials which 

recommend one over the other for different use cases, have any references to talk to that. 

Whilst we have a list of the features of both, there isnt something which would help us truly understand the benefit over the other, our current path is to poc / test and compare both. 

[NickLintgenFV]

No worries, thanks for the response!  It sounds like we'll have to get a POC for the ServiceNow version into our planning backlog.

[Tony_Taylor]

Hi Sarah / Nick,

I wondered if there were any updates here, or if you had any views on the SG Connector, as I am finding myself asking the same in terms of comparisons of the 2 integrations.

[Sarah James]

Hey Tony.

Recommend to go with ServiceNow Service Graph connector for Qualys, however didn't get it fully implemented, was having issues with connections which was an ongoing experience with a few connectors that we tried suspect due to our network configuration. At least with this one you can get support from ServiceNow if you need it. 

[NickLintgenFV]

The Qualys-provided integration has since been renamed to "Qualys CMDB Bi-directional Sync" and the release notes mention "Removed Service-Graph support" (I'm not sure it ever had it).  For a number of reasons & issues we've encountered, this integration has been temporarily (possibly permanently) disabled in our environment.

The ServiceNow-provided Service Graph Connector for Qualys seems to leverage IntegrationHub ETL and we're viewing it as the preferred direction going forward.  We have not yet been able to truly investigate our ability to migrate to this SGC, but that is our general plan.

[NickLintgenFV]

Some follow-up clarifications after additional investigation...

 - only the "Qualys CMDB Bi-directional Sync" will provide functionality to send business information from ServiceNow back to Qualys.

 - we haven't looked into the details ourselves yet, but have been told the "Service Graph Connector for Qualys" does not contain some of the more Qualys-specific data which "Qualys CMDB Bi-directional Sync" populates to app-scoped tables, eg. Qualys Asset Details, Additional Hardware Details, OS Details.