Onboard a new tool using DevOps generic playbook

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated March 12, 2026
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Onboard a new tool using DevOps generic playbook

    The DevOps Change module in ServiceNow provides a pre-built generic playbook designed to guide users through onboarding new tools. This playbook offers a visual, task-oriented experience within the DevOps Change Workspace, ensuring a consistent and streamlined process for integrating custom tools. It supports multiple tool capabilities such as code, plan, and orchestration, allowing users to configure and manage diverse tool types effectively.

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    Key Features

    • Tool Capability Identification: You begin by identifying the capabilities supported by your tool (e.g., code, plan, orchestration). Each capability corresponds to a stage in the playbook with specific activities.
    • Structured Playbook Stages and Activities: The playbook includes stages like Connect to a Tool, Specify Tool Access, Configure the Tool, and capability-specific activities such as Select to Track, Import Data, and Associate (for orchestration tools).
    • Activity Definitions: Activities within the playbook are linked to predefined activity definitions (e.g., DevOps CreateTool AD, DevOps Import Data AD). These definitions determine the tasks and steps shown to users.
    • Dynamic Activity Rendering: The system uses the sndevopscapabilityactivitymapping table to associate activities with tool capabilities and dynamically render appropriate stages and activities. Conditions can be customized to enable or disable activities depending on the tool’s support (e.g., disabling Import Data for tools like GitLab or JFrog).
    • Configurable Activity User Interfaces (UIs): Activity UIs control the user experience for each activity. Multiple UI templates can be configured per activity definition and dynamically rendered based on conditions, allowing tailored experiences per tool.

    Key Outcomes

    By following the guided steps to identify capabilities, configure activity definitions and UIs, you can successfully onboard custom tools into the DevOps Change environment using the generic playbook. This ensures a consistent, repeatable, and efficient onboarding process that accommodates the specific features of your tools, improving integration and change management workflows.

    DevOps Change has a pre-build playbook setup for users to configure a new tool. Custom tool integrations can be created using the guided playbook experience in the DevOps Change Workspace.

    Playbooks provide end users with a visual, task-oriented guide with the steps to complete a process, ensuring a consistent experience for tool onboarding. For detailed information about playbooks, see About Playbook Experience.

    Perform the following steps to onboard your custom tool using the DevOps generic playbook.

    1. Identify tool capabilities

    To configure a tool using the generic playbook, first you must identify the capabilities supported by the tool. A tool can have one or more capabilities like code, plan, and orchestration.

    The Generic playbook consists of the following stages and each stage has its related activities:
    1. Connect to a tool
      1. Connect to a tool
      2. Specify tool access
      3. Configure the tool
    2. Capability

      Capability can be of type plan, code, or orchestrate. If the tool has multiple capabilities, multiple stages exist with the capability name.

      1. Select to track
      2. Import data
      3. Associate (This activity is for the Orchestration tools to associate pipeline steps)
    3. Summary

    This is how a playbook with multiple capabilities looks like:Playbook with multiple capabilities.

    2. Configure Activity Definitions

    Each Activity in a playbook is associated to an activity definition. DevOps has the following activity definitions:
    • DevOps CreateTool AD
    • DevOps Configure & Test AD
    • DevOps Select Associated Objects AD
    • DevOps Import Data AD
    • DevOps Associate Services AD
    • DevOps Summary AD
    For more information, see Exploring Playbook and About Playbook Experience.

    The DevOps table sn_devops_capability_activity_mapping has been created to maintain associations between Activity definitions and capabilities. This table configuration is used to dynamically render the stages and activities for a tool. You can update the conditions as needed to either enable or disable a particular activity for a tool.

    The Tool Capability Activity Mappings table.

    For example, tools like GitLab and JFrog don’t support data import. So you don't require the Data Import activity for such tools. In that case, you must add the logic in the condition column to return false for these types of tools. See the following image as a reference:Example where data import logic is false.

    3. Configure Activity UI for the Activity Definition

    Playbook Activity UIs define the experience type and UI template rendered to users while managing Playbooks. You can configure multiple Activity UIs for an Activity Definition and render any one dynamically based on the condition evaluation.

    DevOps has the following AUIs for Create Tool activity. Except this, all other activity definitions have only one Activity UI.

    DevOps AUIs.

    You can configure any one of the Activity UI based on the requirement.

    Identify the required activity UI and add your tool in the condition builder so that the UI gets effected in the playbook for the tool.Override playbook activity.

    Result

    After completing these steps, your tool can be onboarded using the DevOps generic playbook.