ServiceNow and Puppet- better together, Kevin Reeuwijk
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Puppet Camp Netherlands, 15 Oct 2020
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ServiceNow and Puppet- better together, Kevin Reeuwijk
- 1. Better together ServiceNow + Puppet integrations overview Kevin Reeuwijk Sr Principal Sales Engineer @ Puppet @KevinReeuwijk @KevinR kevin.reeuwijk@puppet.com
- 2. ServiceNow is the smarter way to workflow™ Widely used by IT organizations to manage CMDB, change requests, ticketing and self-service.
- 3. ServiceNow provides a shared data model for ITSM Replace silos of disconnected tools & databases with a central, integrated & connected system
- 4. ServiceNow ITSM consists of 5 components Matching to their respective processes as described in ITIL Incident Management Problem Management Change Management Request Management (Service Catalog) CMDB
- 5. ServiceNow and Puppet are often used in parallel Catering to different, but adjacent, aspects of IT operations
- 6. Now, you can finally connect them together Enable bi-directional data sharing between ServiceNow and Puppet Enterprise
- 7. Puppet integrates with ServiceNow in 4 areas Let developers control aspects of their own systems without sacrificing compliance, security, or operational predictability. Self-Service Infrastructure Reduce the risk of change by enriching change requests with impact analysis details and letting ServiceNow control approvals of Puppet changes. Enriched Change Management Reduce the time and effort required to maintain an accurate drift remediation log. Automated Incident Registration Get accurate, up-to-date information about your CMDB assets in ServiceNow, without having to perform frequent discovery runs. Up-to-date Asset Management
- 8. Self-Service Infrastructure Reduce the risk of change by enriching change requests with impact analysis details and letting ServiceNow control approvals of Puppet changes. Enriched Change Management Reduce the time and effort required to maintain an accurate drift remediation log. Automated Incident Registration Get accurate, up-to-date information about your CMDB assets in ServiceNow, without having to perform frequent discovery runs. Up-to-date Asset Management Let developers control aspects of their own systems without sacrificing compliance, security, or operational predictability. Self-Service Infrastructure
- 9. Integration: Self-Service Infrastructure WHY ● Teaching the entire company to use Puppet for making changes is unrealistic. ● In order for everyone to easily leverage Puppet automation, a better way to interact with Puppet is needed. ?
- 10. Integration: Self-Service Infrastructure WHAT ● Let teams control their own systems without needing any Puppet skills. ● Expose control of specific aspects of Puppet automation directly from the ServiceNow user interface. ● Leverage ServiceNow workflows to streamline common changes.
- 11. Integration: Self-Service Infrastructure HOW ● Puppet reads the fields for a system from a ServiceNow table of choice, and provides the information as facts for that node. ● Use custom fields in ServiceNow to automate any use case, by writing Puppet logic that uses this data. ● Full node classification is possible as well, for even higher levels of flexibility. { "authenticated" : "remote", "certname" : "server1.puppet.com", "domain" : "puppet.com", "extensions" : { }, "external" : { "servicenow" : { "category" : "Hardware", "classification" : "Production", "name" : "server1.puppet.com", "os" : “CentOS”, "os_version" : "7.7.1908", "puppet_classes" : { "role::dbserver" : { } }, "puppet_environment" : "production", "sys_class_name" : "Server", "u_enforced_packages" : "{"openssl":"present", "redis":"absent"}", } } } trusted
- 12. Demo
- 13. Enriched Change Management Let developers control aspects of their own systems without sacrificing compliance, security, or operational predictability. Self-Service Infrastructure Reduce the time and effort required to maintain an accurate drift remediation log. Automated Incident Registration Get accurate, up-to-date information about your CMDB assets in ServiceNow, without having to perform frequent discovery runs. Up-to-date Asset Management Reduce the risk of change by enriching change requests with impact analysis details and letting ServiceNow control approvals of Puppet changes. Enriched Change Management
- 14. Integration: Enriched Change Management WHY ● When you have: ○ Puppet for change execution ○ ServiceNow for change workflow connecting the two is the obvious choice to get the most out of DevOps. ● Reduce manual effort and ensure full registration of the change impact. DevOps
- 15. Integration: Enriched Change Management WHAT ● Automatically generate ServiceNow change requests for proposed Puppet code changes ● Automatically populate change requests with details from Puppet’s Impact Analysis result. ● Automatically deploy changes when the change request is approved.
- 16. Integration: Enriched Change Management HOW ● Integrates CD4PE with ServiceNow ● Interacts with the ServiceNow Change Management API to create change requests, associate affected systems and populate relevant details. ● Comes with a Business Rule for ServiceNow to orchestrate the automated deployment of approved Puppet changes.
- 17. Demo
- 18. Automated Incident Registration Let developers control aspects of their own systems without sacrificing compliance, security, or operational predictability. Self-Service Infrastructure Reduce the risk of change by enriching change requests with impact analysis details and letting ServiceNow control approvals of Puppet changes. Enriched Change Management Get accurate, up-to-date information about your CMDB assets in ServiceNow, without having to perform frequent discovery runs. Up-to-date Asset Management Reduce the time and effort required to maintain an accurate drift remediation log. Automated Incident Registration
- 19. Integration: Automated Incident Registration WHY ● When system configuration that drifted out of compliance is corrected, this information should be registered in ServiceNow. ● Ideally, you want custom business logic to determine when an incident should be created ● Doing all of this manually would not be feasible at scale.
- 20. Integration: Automated Incident Registration WHAT ● Automatically forward relevant details to ServiceNow when Puppet corrects a system that drifted out of compliance. ● Either create incidents directly, or publish events to ServiceNow Event Management to enable custom logic for when incidents should be created.
- 21. Integration: Automated Incident Registration HOW ● Puppet agent run reports are scanned for corrective changes and failures ● When changes or failures are detected, relevant details are forwarded to the ServiceNow API ● This can either be done as events, enabling custom logic, or directly as regular incidents.
- 22. Demo
- 23. Up-to-date Asset Management Let developers control aspects of their own systems without sacrificing compliance, security, or operational predictability. Self-Service Infrastructure Reduce the risk of change by enriching change requests with impact analysis details and letting ServiceNow control approvals of Puppet changes. Enriched Change Management Reduce the time and effort required to maintain an accurate drift remediation log. Automated Incident Registration Get accurate, up-to-date information about your CMDB assets in ServiceNow, without having to perform frequent discovery runs. Up-to-date Asset Management
- 24. Integration: Up-to-date Asset Management WHY ● Without Puppet, you need ServiceNow Discovery to keep the details of systems in the CMDB up-to-date ● Such discovery runs are known to have an unwanted stability impact on production systems. ● It is more efficient to update the details in the CMDB from Puppet’s database directly. on the roadmap
- 25. Integration: Up-to-date Asset Management WHAT ● Inventory data from the Puppet database is periodically gathered and uploaded to ServiceNow. ● A Puppet app for ServiceNow processes the staged data and updates the CMDB as necessary. ● Focus ServiceNow Discovery usage to detecting new/rogue systems only, while Puppet keeps information up-to- date for all known systems. on the roadmap
- 26. Integration: Up-to-date Asset Management HOW ● Puppet will periodically upload details about the systems it knows about to a holding area in ServiceNow. ● A new Puppet app for ServiceNow will then process the uploaded information and update CI details as necessary with the latest information. on the roadmap task: servicenow_assets::get_node_facts schedule: daily params: - targets: [srv1.company.com, …] - facts: [serialnumber, operatingsystem, …] ServiceNow MID Server JSON JSON JSON JSON update Puppet CMDB Sync (ServiceNow Marketplace app)
- 27. The 4 integrations of Puppet and ServiceNow Type: Puppet Module Available: Now Where: Puppet Forge Name: servicenow_cmdb_integration Self-Service Infrastructure Type: Puppet Module Available: Now Where: Puppet Forge Name: servicenow_change_requests Enriched Change Management Type: Puppet Module Available: Now Where: Puppet Forge Name: servicenow_reporting_integration Automated Incident Registration Type: ServiceNow App Available: TBD Where: ServiceNow Marketplace Name: TBD Up-to-date Asset Management
Editor's Notes
- You’re probably well aware of what ServiceNow is, but just in case you’re not: ServiceNow is one of the leading IT Service Management & IT Operations Management platforms on the market. It is one of the first all-cloud Platform-as-a-Service solutions in this space, with competitors being mostly on-premise or partner-hosted solutions.
- Good ITSM platforms give you a shared data model to replace lots of individual tools, spreadsheets, databases, email processes, etc. Everyone can work from a single source of truth, and every process can be governed by a single tool.
- The core ITSM offering of ServiceNow is made up of these 5 components: A CMDB to track all your IT assets Request Management to enable self-service to users via a Service Catalog Change Management to document & approve planned changes Incident Management to document & track service disruptions Problem Management to track known issues These processes, that stem from ITIL, are closely related to activities that Puppet performs in your infrastructure. A way to look at it is this: where Puppet takes action to execute a change, the process around it -from definition to approval- is governed by ServiceNow.
- Therefore we can think of ServiceNow and Puppet as opposite sides of the same coin. The vast majority of Puppet’s customers have ServiceNow in place, working mostly in parallel. That also means that some information is duplicated across both platforms, and some level of manual effort is involved to get information of one platform into the other. Over time, several of our customers have built their own integrations to make this more efficient; but more generally supported integrations have been a long-standing desire from our customers.
- Well, today I’m happy to announce that the wait is over! We have been working hard to connect ServiceNow and Puppet in several different ways, making it easier to share data between both platforms. We worked with our customers to determine the specific areas where bi-directional data sharing & automation is needed, and developed integrations that cater to those needs.
- We are going to look at 3 brand-new integrations that are available for you today, and we are announcing a 4th integration that we plan to deliver in the future. Available now are: An integration that allows you to use ServiceNow as a self-service frontend for controlling Puppet automation An integration that connects planned Puppet changes to the ITIL change management process in ServiceNow An integration that sends change events to ServiceNow for correlation & analysis, generating incidents when needed Planned for later is an integration to update the ServiceNow CMDB with data from Puppet, we will come back to that at the end.
- So let’s start with Self Service.
- There’s a very good reason for why you’d want an integration like this: not everybody in the company knows how to use Puppet to automate changes. There’s probably a fairly limited amount of people in your company today that directly work with Puppet. Others would likely benefit from using Puppet as well, but expecting everyone to get properly trained to do so is unrealistic. So we need to make it far easier to leverage Puppet, which is what this integration does.
- In a nutshell, the integration allows you to use ServiceNow as a friendly user interface to control either all or parts of Puppet automation. For the most user friendly experience, create custom fields on your CMDB table for anything you’d like to give users direct control over, for example: Additional packages that can be installed at will OS kernel settings Application tuning parameters This data can then be easily acted upon in your Puppet automation. You can allow direct changes to the fields provided, or make them read-only and use ServiceNow workflows to allow controlled modifications only.
- The way the integration works, is that we read the fields for a system directly from ServiceNow, and exposes the information as a fact. That makes the content directly usable in your Puppet code, as input for your automation. You remain in complete control over what happens. For the utmost level of self service, you can create a Puppet Environment and a Puppet Classes field in ServiceNow, turning it into a fully fledged node classifier. The integration provides built-in logic to parse those 2 specific fields, converting the data into proper Puppet classes and Hiera data automatically. However, direct control for users over this option would require a bit of Puppet knowledge, so direct control might not always be the best approach there. A good alternative is to have these fields be read-only for users, and use ServiceNow workflows to facilitate controlled modifications to the classification data.
- Next, let’s take a look at Change Management.
- For most of our customers, Puppet is their primary change execution platform. For many of those customers, ServiceNow is their primary change registration & approval platform. Naturally this should be one, interconnected, solution. That’s exactly what this integration provides. This one is all about the handoffs between one platform to the other and vice versa.
- When you propose a Puppet code change, this integration automatically generates a ServiceNow Change Request from the Puppet Impact Analysis report. Once the Change Request has been approved and reaches the Implement stage, the integration lets ServiceNow orchestrate the promotion of the change into production. This integration eliminates a number of manual steps in the change process, enabling greater efficiency, improved change documentation and faster cycle times.
- This integration is built in the Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise add-on, and uses its Impact Analysis feature to generate relevant details that need to go into the ServiceNow Change Request. The integration interacts with the ServiceNow Change Management API to create the Change Request and associate affected systems to the change. The integration also provides a Business Rule for ServiceNow to automate the promotion of the Puppet code into production. It can even approve deployments for protected environments in CD4PE, for an additional layer of security.
- Next, let’s take a look at registering incidents from change events.
- While the previous integration deals with planned changes, this integration is for compliance drift corrections: changes that were made to bring a system back to the correct configuration after it drifted out of compliance. Since there is no way to know when this happens, the Change Management process is not suited for this scenario. Instead, this should be documented as an event and incident should be created if the circumstances warrant it. This is definitely best left for robots to do, instead of humans.
- With this integration, Puppet forwards summary data of Puppet run results to ServiceNow. This can be in the form of basic incidents (when a corrective changed occured), or -and this is better- you can send the information as events to ServiceNow Event Management. In the latter case, you can create your own Event Rules to correlate events and create consolidated Incidents when certain thresholds are crossed. This way, there will be 1 incident for the same change happening on multiple systems.
- The integration comes in the form of a Puppet report processor, that automatically analyses incoming Puppet run reports for changes and failures. In its basic mode, it will create an incident whenever a corrective change or failure occurs on a system. In its advanced mode, it will send events to ServiceNow Event Management so that you can more finely control what happens to these events, when alerts are generated and if that should result in the creation of an Incident.
- Finally, I have one more integration to announce. This integration is not yet ready, but planned for the future. It is intended to provide a better way to keep your CMDB up-to-date, without having to resort to frequent discovery runs.
- The biggest struggle of maintaining a CMDB is to keep the information up-to-date. Outdated CMDBs have been a problem for many organizations, and have given rise to discovery & inventory add-ons like ServiceNow Discovery. However such tools often run agentlessly and are known to cause a performance impact or stability problems on the systems they interrogate. As a result, customer don’t like running these tools frequently. By contrast, Puppet already knows everything about the systems it manages, and stores that information in its own database. Updating the CMDB in ServiceNow directly from Puppet’s database, would be a lot more efficient compared to agentless discovery tools.
- Puppet automatically collects information about the systems it manages, as part of its normal enforcement runs: Software Inventory Standard facts about the hardware and operating system Custom facts you create yourself The integration will allow you to select which data you’d like to send to ServiceNow for updating existing CI’s. This reduces the scope for ServiceNow Discovery to just finding new or rogue systems on the network.
- On the Puppet Enterprise side, a Task will periodically gather the latest information from the Puppet database, and upload it to a staging location on a ServiceNow MID server. On the ServiceNow side, a Puppet App (from the ServiceNow Marketplace) periodically processes the uploaded data and updates fields in the CMDB as necessary.
- The three integration I discussed first, are available right now as modules on the Puppet Forge. They come with clear instructions on how to setup each integration. The CMDB update integration will be delivered as an app in the ServiceNow Marketplace, probably somewhere in 2021. Stay tuned for more info on that as we move forward.
- That’s all I had to show you for this presentation. If you’d like to see a little more technical background on how these integrations really work, come join us in the ServiceNow workshop during the breakout tracks! That’s also where we can go into any questions you may have about these integrations.