Your Next Integration Design Workshop - Part 2

[Gaurav Bajaj]

Previously we talked about a few essential areas for the integration design workshop. Lets talk about a few additional areas to decide during design conversation itself.

• Push vs. Pull Mechanism

Another key design decision is whether the integration should use a push or pull model. In a push model, external systems proactively send data into ServiceNow, which is useful when updates must be processed immediately. A classic example is a monitoring system pushing alerts to ServiceNow incidents. In a pull model, ServiceNow queries another system only when needed, such as retrieving employee details from an HR system during a service request. Each approach has implications for performance, scalability, and cost.

You need to agree with other tool architects and technical team on the mechanism of data transfer. For example, push is desired approach as upstream systems should send data to ServiceNow but sometime the upstream system may have limitation or tech team on other side is unable to provide an API. In such cases, you need to provide your recommendation on best practice and try to manage conversation from user experience and platform performance standpoint.

• Authentication & Security

Security is another area of consideration and should be discussed early in the design workshop. Choosing the right authentication approach—whether OAuth 2.0, Mutual TLS, or another method—sets the tone for how secure and scalable the solution will be. It’s also important to define how access will be managed, ensuring integration follows the principal of least privilege and only exposes the necessary functionality. ServiceNow has introduced Machine identify access control in Zurich release to control the granular level access of integration accounts. Beyond authentication, consider compliance requirements such as GDPR or HIPAA, which might place additional constraints on how data is exchanged. By prioritizing security in the design phase, you avoid technical debt or rework later.

Always plan to align with CISO team on integration standards and security followed at the organization and remain complaint to security policies.

• Maintenance & Support

During the design workshop, dedicate time to thinking about how the integration will be monitored, maintained, and evolved. This includes defining strategies for error handling, logging, and retries, as well as setting up dashboards or alerts to track integration health.

Integration hub provides dashboards to monitor integration but ensure designing the fallback mechanism in case of errors. A good start is to log an incident in case of integration failure so that the failed transaction can be manually handled for a transactional failure. Make sure to identify the support group in case of failure so incidents can be routed to the required team to provide timely resolution.

The next time you’re in that workshop, take the opportunity to prepare a checklist of items to be discussed to be able to design a robust, scalable and secure integration. This is not an exhaustive list but surely something to give you enough to understand and design the integration in best way possible.