Introduction to Infrastructure Automation with ServiceNow
Infrastructure automation is the process of using technology to perform tasks related to managing and maintaining IT infrastructure with minimal human intervention. This includes automating repetitive tasks such as provisioning servers, configuring networks, servers health check and deploying applications.
Setting Up Your ServiceNow Instance for Infrastructure Automation
To prepare a ServiceNow instance for doing infrastructure automation, we need to follow a sequence of steps. This involves enabling the required plugins and setting up a Mid Server to enable connectivity between the ServiceNow instance and our local environment.
Let us deep dive into preparing our ServiceNow instance by enabling the required plugins. In this blog, we will assume that we will be interacting with Windows Servers and will be making use of PowerShell scripts to perform operations on these servers using ServiceNow Flow Designer.
To enable Flow Designer for running the PowerShell scripts, we will need the access to PowerShell Step
The PowerShell step requires at least Integration Hub Professional subscription so we need to enable either Integration Hub Professional or Enterprise plugin for us to start our journey. To enable it on PDI, we will follow below steps:
- Login to https://developer.servicenow.com/ and ensure that we have a PDI allocated and the PDI is not hibernating. If you don't have a PDI available, request for a new one by clicking on Request Instance button and selecting the release on which you want your PDI to be. If your PDI is hibernating, wait until it is up and running.
- Once you have a PDI available, click on your name at the extreme top-right side of the page and under the instance action section, click on Activate Plugin.
3. Search for ServiceNow IntegrationHub and activate either of ServiceNow IntegrationHub Professional Pack Installer or Enterprise Pack Installer.
4. Wait until the plugin activation is completed. You will receive an email once the plugin is activated.
In the next blog, we will focus on setting up the Mid Server within our Desktop/Laptop and will test the Mid Server connectivity from a ServiceNow Flow Designer Action via PowerShell step.
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