Introduction
I was recently presented with the request to bring Microsoft Intune data into the CMDB, without leveraging Service Graph, and wanted to document my experience. In this series of articles, I’m going to cover the key milestones of bringing in data via the Microsoft Graph API into the NOW platform and hopefully provide you with some insights, tricks and gotchas I’ve discovered along the way.
This series is largely bourne out of the lack of existing documentation that provides an end to end guide to setting up such an integration. I do however want to say thank you to xostmoen’s article and Maverick Embry blog post that helped me with a starting point.
What is Microsoft Intune?
Intune is a cloud-based mobile device management (MDM) solution that allows organisations to control laptops, phones and tablets from a centralised console. As someone who’s largely been in organisations that have used SCCM the platform is comparable as an outsider (adding this caveat so the SCCM fans don’t come after me for such blasphemy) with the bonus of being much easier to integrate with thanks to the cloud-first, structured and framework data model.
What is Microsoft Graph?
Graph API is a single gateway into the world of data that resides within Microsoft 365. It removes the frustration of different endpoints, formats and data models that comes within integrating with on-prem solutions and adds a strict uniform model of requesting and manipulating data. It’s not perfect and the documentation from Microsoft could be better but it does simplify integrations; especially if your organisation has a number of MS365 services.
How will this integration work?
I’ve broken this down into its key areas. Each of these areas can be applied to other integrations either with MS Graph, or another API set. So hopefully this series provides you with some transferable skills and principal knowledge on integrations!
- Authenticating and authorisation with Microsoft Graph
- Retrieving data
- Pro-code script approach
- Low-code flow designer approach
- Transforming data into the CMDB using Integrationhub ETL
- Optional extras
Pre-requisites
To get started, the following plugins should be activated on your instance:
- OAuth 2.0 (com.snc.platform.security.oauth) - This is available by default on new and upgraded instances.
- Integration Commons for CMDB (sn_cmdb_int_util)
- IntegrationHub ETL (sn_int_studio)
- CMDB CI Class Models (sn_cmdb_ci_class)
- Datastream Action (com.glide.hub.action_type.datastream) - Only required if going for the low-code approach. Check with your ServiceNow rep as you may need to buy an upgraded IntegrationHub entitlement!
I'll be developing the integration within a scoped application. For admin delegation purposes, but the added benefit of having it all stored within an application rather than update sets. This makes it so much easier to maintain and somewhat reduces the need for cumbersome documentation that is instantly out of date.
