Service Now integration with FTP

[sorensalte]

We need to integrate Service Now with an FTP. The FTP will contain two xml folders. One of the folders will contain data from HP Service Manager 7.0 and the other folder will contain data uploaded from the Service Now instance. See attachment

1. Can we use Update Set for receiving information from the FTP?
2. What should we use for receiving information from the FTP?
3. Is there any example of settings that we need to do in SNC?
4. Is there a wiki page/demo for this?

[dh4234]

When it comes to extracting data i prefer to use the ODBC driver. You can setup Excel to go out and query your Service-Now instance every 5 minutes or whatever time you specify. I almost always prefer pulling the data rather than pushing the data when doing data transfers.

[sorensalte]

Hi John,

Some background information first:
Our customer runs HP Service Manager today. This customer has a lot of operation customers (IT).
The customer wants their customers to be able to communicate with them, and they want to offer Service Now. So we need Service Now to be able to communicate with HP Service Manager.
We have approx 10 fields in the incident module that we want to transfer to HP Service Manager.
This should result in a new ticket in HP Service Manager.

Structure is like this: HP Service Manger -> Connect it -> FTP -> Service Now.

When users in Service Now choose a particular assignment group (external group) and click the save button a new view will be displayed and almost all fields will be read-only. We want to transer these fields into an FTP and furter to Connect it and HP Service Manager where a new ticket will be created.

[john_andersen]

Thanks for the background!

If this is the case, first I would press for a web services answer instead of FTP. When doing transaction based integrations, web services would be the preferred method (both incoming and outgoing).

If you are stuck with FTP, then you will use the options that imartez suggested for incoming (into SN) and use my suggestion for writing a custom web service on your end that accepts data from SN and writes it to file on the FTP location.

However, you will need to worry about multiple FTP files. You will want to process them in timestamp order, etc.

Bottom line, exhaust all possibilities of going through Web Services instead of FTP for this.

[sorensalte]

Hi again John

We have discussed how to get files from Service Now to HP ServiceManager.
Do you think we can use the following method?

Incident table in ServiceNow -> Create a new table, lets say "Event Out". We will then copy fields from Incident table to the new Event Out table. Can we then enable Simple Web Service for the Event Out folder?

If this is possible we can use Connect-it to pick up stuff from the Event Out folder, and we can skip the FTP for outgoing stuff.

Is there any documentation for this?

Regards,
Søren

[john_andersen]

Søren,

This is what I would do.

1) create a business rule on the Incident table itself. It can be set to trigger on new incidents or updates to existing incidents
http://wiki.service-now.com/index.php?title=Business_Rules

2) Create a SOAP Message template for connecting to your HP Service-Manager web service. When the business rule triggers, you send the incident data for the ticket via the web service.
http://wiki.service-now.com/index.php?title=Web_Service_Consumer_Plugin#SOAP_Message

This solution will not require a new table "event out" to be created. It can all happen right out of the incident table itself.

John