Getting the ServiceNow IBM Netcool Plugin to work with IBM Netcool/OMNIBUS 7.4 with Socket Writer Gateway

[jason_petty]

I have been involved with a number of integrations with customers with IBM Netcool/OMNIBUS with the Socket Writer Gateway as the Inbound communication method recently and wanted to share what we had to do to get it to work with the ServiceNow Plug-in. The ServiceNow Plug-in was written for an older version of Netcool so there are a few changes on both sides that you can make to get it to work. The first thing you should do is read the wiki article about this plug-in to understand how it works. This article is found here: Netcool Integration

NOTE: If you are installing IBM Netcool/OMNIBUS on a Windows server and want to auto start the Socket Writer Gateway with the Socket Monitor, you will need to map a drive to the server running the Socket Writer Gateway. That drive will be used in the "Socket writer gateway" field when putting a path for it to launch the gateway. If you are installing on Linux, I have not found a way to make this work without having a port conflict.


The following changes only apply if you DID NOT check the box "Start socket writer." You will use your own map file on your server running the Socket Writer Gateway. If you do check the box, then just configure your map and properties files appropriately right there in the instance. These will get copied to your MID server and will be used to run the Gateway.

ServiceNow Side Changes

• You can add custom fields to your map by following this article: Adding Custom Fields to the Netcool Integration. You will need to look at the "netcoolSocketMontiorMap" MID Server Script Include to see what the default order of fields are in the map so you can make your map file match it.
• You could also choose to modify the MID Server Script include "NetcoolSocketMonitorMap" to make it match your map file so the values come into the import set table in the right order.

Netcool Side changes

• You will need to modify the Headers and Separator settings in your properties file so that when alarms come into the ECC Queue the script will be able to process them. The Socket Monitor Script looks for the words "update" and "insert" in lowercase and also expect to have a "|" as the delimiter.
  
  • Gate.Socket.InsertHeader              : 'insert| '
  • Gate.Socket.UpdateHeader            : 'update| '
  • Gate.Socket.Separator                   : '|'