Creating a service desk integration for ServiceNow assets

The Oomnitza plugin for ServiceNow associates incidents with assets and provides desk agents with the insights that they need to resolve incidents quickly. 

Check out the insights that the Oomnitza integration offers to desk agents:

• View ServiceNow tickets in Oomnitza and view Oomnitza assets in ServiceNow. 
• Display the devices that belong to the caller who raised the ticket.
• Resolve incidents efficiently and quickly by using Oomnitza to retrieve asset records and view the history of ServiceNow tickets.
• Display the devices that are associated with a ticket based on the set of custom attributes that you define. 
• Configure asset management fields to track the attributes that matter to you.
• Automate the tracking of hardware and software attributes so that you can get an asset’s details easily and efficiently.

Navigation

Installing the Oomnitza plugin

Connecting ServiceNow to Oomnitza

Configure ServiceNow roles

Integrating Oomnitza with ServiceNow

About the plugin

The Oomnitza plugin for ServiceNow enables you to view and link assets associated with tickets in ServiceNow and Oomnitza. When you set up this service first, the plugin displays all the devices that belong to the incident caller and offer the ability to attach additional assets to the ServiceNow ticket. By default, the Oomnitza add-on for ServiceNow displays all devices linked to an incident. 

Installing the Oomnitza plugin

To make Oomnitza asset information available in ServiceNow, you must request the Oomnitza plugin. The plugin is available from the ServiceNow Store. Enter Oomnitza in the search panel and follow the prompts to install. For further information, refer to the ServiceNow documentation: Downloading an application from the ServiceNow Store.

Once you have installed the plugin, activate the application in ServiceNow. To activate the application, complete the following steps:

1.  Navigate to System Applications > All Available Applications > All.
2. Enter Oomnitza in the search panel.
3. Follow the prompts to install the application. For further information, refer to the ServiceNow documentation: Activate a ServiceNow Store application.

Tip
If you are using a free Personal Development Instance (PDI) or demo instance of ServiceNow, you cannot install plugins from the ServiceNow store. If you try to install a plugin, you will receive the following error: Sorry, you can’t login with this ServiceNow Id. However, you can contact Oomnitza directly in the ServiceNow store with your vendor instance name. Your vendor instance name takes the format https://dev123456.service-now.com/. Oomnitza can then push the plugin to your instance for you to install. Once you receive notification from Oomnitza that the plugin has been pushed to your instance, complete the steps above to search for and install the Oomnitza plugin.

Result

The Oomnitza plugin is installed. When you log into your ServiceNow instance, two additional tabs are made available:

• The Oomnitza Configuration tab
• The Oomnitza Support tab

Connecting ServiceNow to Oomnitza

1. In the side panel in ServiceNow, enter Oomnitza in the search field.
2. Select the Configuration tab.
3. Enter the URL of your Oomnitza instance such as https://<your_company_name>.oomnitza.com.
4. Click Save.

Configure ServiceNow roles

Once installed, you may can assign roles and permissions in ServiceNow to ensure the desired end users have access to the Oomnitza plugin. You can assign a role directly, or update an existing role to add or inherit the new role. You can also assign the role to a group.

• For users that will configure or interact with the Oomnitza app, assign the following role: x_333437_oomnitza.configuration_user.
• For users who require access to the asset information that the Oomnitza app provides within the ServiceDesk, assign either one of these roles: sn_incident_read, incident_manager , or itil.

Note: you may choose to add the Oomnitza app role as a child role of the existing incident_manager or itil role for users to automatically inherit access to the Oomnitza plugin, otherwise you can always assign the Oomnitza app role individually.

To create a role in ServiceNow, go to Users and Groups > Roles. 

To assign a role to a user in ServiceNow, go to  User Administration > Users

For detailed information, consult the ServiceNow documentation. 

Warning
You may encounter issues with the plugin if the Service Now roles listed above have been modified. This can take the form of the plugin erroring out unexpectedly. If this is the case you may need to add additional roles. Refer to the sys_user_role table in ServiceNow for a complete list of user roles. We recommend that you first test the issue by adding the admin role to the service account user to ensure that it is not a permission issue. 

Integrating Oomnitza with ServiceNow

Before you complete the integration in Oomnitza, you’ll need the following information:

• The URL of your ServiceNow instance.
• The username and password of the user account. The user must have been assigned the following role: x_333437_oomnitza.configuration_user.

Best practice
For the integration with Oomnitza, create a dedicated user account.

Setting up the integration

To integrate Oomnitza with ServiceNow, complete the following steps:

1. Log into Oomnitza.
2. From the menu, click Configuration > Integrations and click Block view
3. Scroll down to Service Desk Integrations, and click the ServiceNow tile.
4. Click NEXT.
5. Enter the URL of your ServiceNow instance https://dev123456.service-now.com/.
6. Enter the username and password of the dedicated user account that you created for the integration.
7. Click CONNECT.
8. Choose the fields that you want to display in the Oomnitza tab in ServiceNow. Select which fields are editable, and which are read-only.
9. Click FINISH.