ServiceNow

Purpose

ServiceNow is central to thousands of different workflows across much of the Delphix customer base. It has become a central place for self-service users to request services and solutions from other teams within their organization. Early leaders of the Delphix customer base have invested in custom, self-service workflows in ServiceNow to execute Delphix-based data operations. Based on the growing demand from our customers, we are introducing a new Delphix Spoke for ServiceNow to provide a fully supported, off-the-shelf solution.

Click the picture to learn about the Delphix ServiceNow Spoke!

Overview

The Delphix Spoke for ServiceNow includes key data and infrastructure actions that are building blocks for orchestrating data automation. Together with other business rules, integrations, and processes within ServiceNow, customers can design complex workflows, dashboards, and data catalogs to support self-service automation and ensure corporate governance compliance. Ultimately, this solution capability will streamline DevOps test data management, site reliability engineering (SRE), and administrative processes.

By offering a broad range of actions within the Delphix spoke, mutual customers will be empowered to design their workflows to support any number of data-related use cases. We anticipate common themes across the use cases that include:

• Use Case 1: DevOps Test Data Management - Application development teams today are often burdened with many challenges to quickly accessing compliant and fresh test data. Customers can now design ServiceNow flows to perform critical data actions through a Data Catalog experience such as provisioning new data sets, refreshing existing sets, and destroying obsolete data sets.

• Use Case 2: Site Reliability Engineering - The Delphix Spoke’s actions can be used to trigger timely responses in the event of a ransomware attack or to trigger investigative workflows to diagnose the root cause of an application failure. As such, a complex workflow that involves multiple tools, such as APM, GCP, and Delphix, can be centrally orchestrated through ServiceNow.

• Use Case 3: Administrative - Routing administrative and operational actions such as creating and deleting users, starting and stopping source database ingestion, and clearing all lingering VDBs after a certain amount of time.

Business Challenges

• Reduce Database-related Cloud Costs - For many QA teams, actual test environment utilization is less than 5%, which means you’re paying a high cost for idle infrastructure. Moving to ephemeral, on-demand test data runs can lower costs by 20x.

• Increase application delivery speed - Many companies are on a journey to release software faster. Moving from slow to fast application releases requires eliminating manual activities such as ticketing systems to request DBAs to refresh test data environments. With ServiceNow and Delphix, manual processes can be streamlined by automating test data management.

• Improve quality by shifting testing left - In many development programs, there’s not enough time or coverage to fully test a new release. Errors discovered late in the process either delay releases or blow up production. With a Self-Service Data Catalog through ServiceNow, enterprises can automate the management of the most complex environments and run tests much earlier.

• Governance & Audibility - Sharing production datasets produces considerable risk that organizations look to minimize. Traditionally, this has forced companies to manually record dataset locations and enforce limitations. This approach, however, does not scale or give confidence to auditors.

Getting Started

To install or upgrade the Delphix Spoke for ServiceNow, follow the below steps. Visit the ServiceNow Store for additional information.

Prerequisites

The following prerequisites are required to configure the Delphix Spoke on the ServiceNow platform:

• Delphix Data Control Tower 17.0 or later with compatible Continuous Data Engines.

• ServiceNow Washington DC or Vancouver releases.

• The Integration Hub Plugin must be installed and enabled.

  • The Starter (Free), Standard, Professional, or Enterprise Packs are all supported.

• (Optional) ServiceNow Management, Instrumentation, and Discovery (MID) Server

  • The MID Server enables Data Control Tower to communicate with your ServiceNow instance. This is required if ServiceNow cannot access Data Control Tower.

To install and manage the Delphix Spoke for ServiceNow, consult the Configuration directions.

Configuration

Below are steps to be performed by users with Delphix Administrator and ServiceNow Administrator permissions.

1. Install Data Control Tower (DCT) with one or more Delphix Continuous Data Engines, refer to DCT Installation.

2. Install the ServiceNow Platform server, Integration Hub plugin, and Delphix Spoke for ServiceNow.

   1. [Optional] If the DCT and ServiceNow instances are on different private networks, install a MID server. For more information, refer to ServiceNow’s MID Server documentation.

   2. If using a MID Server, ensure the MID Security Policy is as shown in the image below.

3. In ServiceNow, go to the Connection & Credentials Alias tab and create a new Connection Alias. Specify the HTTP(s) Connection with the DCT Connection URL, (optional) DCT administrator credentials, and (optional) MID server.

4. The DCT connection URL must take the following format: https://<DCT_HOSTNAME>/<api_version>

   1. The api_version value is based on DCT API’s version. If using DCT v7 or greater, we recommend specifying v3.

5. Perform the following steps to leverage DCT’s RBAC( Role Based Access Control) model in the self-service Delphix catalog:

   1. In DCT, configure the desired RBAC model, refer here.

   2. In DCT, for each user, retrieve a DCT API Key that will use the self-service catalog.

   3. In ServiceNow, create a new record in the user table, x_dr_delphix_sgc_user table for each user. This table is automatically created during Delphix Spoke installation. Each record must include a ServiceNow user record, the corresponding DCT API Key, and an applicable Connection & Credentials Alias,created in Step 3 above. Below is the step to create a mapping.

      1. On the ServiceNow Homepage, search Tables.

      2. Under System Definition, click Tables.

      3. On the Tables page, search “x_dr_delphix_sgc_user”.

      4. Select the first search result user.

      5. Find the Related Links list and select Show List.
         

      6. Then select New toinsert a record with the below 3 values.

         1. ServiceNow User - the user for whom the mapping is to be done.

            1. Click your profile picture in the top right to confirm if validating yourself.

         2. DCT User API Key - API key associated with the user. (Example: apk 2.123...)

         3. Connection Alias - A connection alias to establish a connection to DCT.

6. Validation: As an end user, go to the Service Catalog, select a catalog Item, such as "Delphix: Refresh VDB from Bookmark", and enter the required properties to perform the automated request. Success and error messaging are provided as additional comments.

Upgrades

Updating the Delphix Spoke for ServiceNow version can be performed through the ServiceNow Store page. Default migration steps are performed automatically through the upgrade process. However, specific architecture or design changes are possible in major versions and will be called out in the release notes. If you have performed custom modifications to your catalog items or flows, we recommend reviewing the release notes to better understand how you might be affected.

Advanced Usage

The Delphix Spoke for ServiceNow can be repurposed in a variety of ways through other ServiceNow modules. Below are a few examples of how to get started.

Catalog Items

Leverage the provided Catalog Actions and associated Flows in the App Studio or Flow Designer to build customized Catalog Items. Users can create new or modify existing Catalog Items and leverage any combination of flow logic or other 3rd party Spokes.  

Dashboards

ServiceNow dashboards are managed under Self-Service > Dashboards and the underlying Widgets (such as metrics, tables, and numbers) are managed under Reports > View / Run. ServiceNow administrators can build custom reports to monitor usage patterns of the Delphix catalog items and actions.  

To learn more about Delphix and DCT APIs, refer to Delphix Docs and DCT Docs respectively.

Technical Architecture

The Delphix Spoke is a scoped application (or integration) that implements Actions as REST API wrappers around Delphix Data Control Tower APIs. Each action within the spoke corresponds to a data or infrastructure CRUD operation on the Delphix Data Control Tower. ServiceNow customers will use the Actions to build a customized Flow through the ServiceNow Flow Designer. Each Flow consists of various if-else statements from any number of 3rd party integrations. The produced Flow is a set of manual and automated steps that are run as part of a ServiceNow request.

Key Components

1. ServiceNow: Customers leverage the Now Platform to design a variety of manual and automated IT workflows. The workflows are built through the Flow Designer using Spoke Actions and then provided as service requests to end users. End users, such as Developers and Testers, will access Delphix through this mechanism.

2. Delphix Spoke: The Delphix Spoke is a collection of several Actions, each one corresponding to a specific operation on the Delphix Data Control Tower (DCT). Every action in Delphix Spoke calls one or more DCT APIs which then triggers data or infrastructure operations on one of the associated Delphix Continuous Data Engines. ServiceNow practitioners will construct the requests through the Flow Designer and Spoke actions.

3. Delphix Data Control Tower (DCT): DCT is a unified data management platform used to enable API-driven DevOps workflows with continuous data and centrally manage the entire data estate for all Delphix customers. DCT connects to one or more Delphix engines.

4. Delphix Engine(s): Delphix is a data management platform that provides the ability to copy, manage, migrate, move, mask, and share datasets securely. Note: Today, only the Delphix Continuous Data Engine is supported.

5. Management, Installation, Discovery (MID) Server (Optional): The ServiceNow MID Server is a relay that enables communication and the movement of data between a ServiceNow instance and external applications, data sources, and services.

Delphix spoke features

Delphix spoke features - actions

Delphix spoke features - actions (continued)

Videos

• Data Control Tower and ServiceNow

• ServiceNow Spoke in 60 seconds

• ServiceNow Spoke - Initial Configuration

Support

Delphix Spoke for ServiceNow support is included within the standard Delphix License Agreement. For any questions, bugs, or feature requests, contact us via Delphix Support or the Delphix Community Portal.