For most organizations today, the adoption of Cloud infrastructure is more prevalent than ever and along with that comes Cloud based Active Directory. As an organization, you want to simplify authentication procedures across all enterprise applications and that can be achieved through Single Sign-On (SSO).
Whether you’re an existing organization, or are just evaluating ServiceNow as a platform, in this tutorial I’m going to walk through how you as a ServiceNow Administrator can configure Azure AD to control what users and groups are populated in your ServiceNow environment, and establish Single Sign-On services to the ServiceNow application as well.
This is a 4 part series
- Setting Up Our Test Azure & ServiceNow Accounts (this article)
- Preparing our ServiceNow Personal Developer Instance
- Adding ServiceNow Enterprise Application & Initial Setup
- Configure Azure SSO & Provisioning
Microsoft 365
The first step we need to take is creating a Microsoft 365 Developer Account. This is a free program to join and gives access to a lot of Microsoft features to explore and learn - including an Azure tenant. Of course if you’re setting this up for an already-existing tenant you won’t need to follow this step and can move on to Part 2 of this tutorial series.
To get started, navigate to https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/dev-program and click on Join now. You will be prompted to sign in with a Microsoft account, if you don’t have one to use then create one.
Once you’re signed in, choose the Instant Sandbox option and choose Next, fill in the requested information, and click Continue. Once you’re through all prompts, you should see a screen like below:
Additional step: click on Go to subscription and you’ll be prompted to setup Microsoft Authenticator app as a required security measure.
At this point your developer account is being setup in the background, and it may take a few minutes before everything is ready, but you can check by going to https://portal.azure.com/ - should everything be good to go you’ll see the Azure admin portal.
This is where we will stop for now.
ServiceNow PDI
The next step is to get our ServiceNow instance we are going to learn on. ServiceNow offers what are called Personal Developer Instances (PDI for short) and it is a great tool for learning new things on the platform without impacting a live environment. If you’re an avid ServiceNow user or admin, you likely already have a PDI setup with lots of customization, and you can skip over this part.
To get a new PDI head over to https://developer.servicenow.com/ and click Sign In at the top. Should you NOT already have a ServiceNow ID, then click at the bottom where it says “Get a ServiceNow ID” and enter your credentials, and do the normal routine of verifying your email address. Otherwise, just sign in with your current account.
Once logged in you should see this screen:
To have a new PDI provisioned for you, click “Request Instance” at the top of the page and kick back - it may take up to 10 minutes for your new instance to be ready to go in some situations. Once it’s ready click on “Start Building” and you’ll be logged in using the provided System Administrator account.
And that’s all there is to it! You now are the proud owner of a Microsoft 365 Developer account and new ServiceNow PDI and are ready to continue on to Part 2 where we will dive into some ServiceNow configuration to prepare for Azure integration!
