We are pleased to announce another integration with one of our strategic partners, ServiceNow. 

Available today with the launch of ServiceNow’s Paris release, LogicMonitor supports the Service Graph Connector! LogicMonitor was selected by ServiceNow as a key player and one of the first monitoring platforms invited to this new, exclusive program. 

Enhance Operational Efficiency with Improvements to the LogicMonitor ServiceNow CMDB Integration 

In true ServiceNow fashion, the Paris release today is loaded with new features across their product portfolio, including major upgrades for managing the increasingly important and complex CMDB.

Service Graph Connector evolves the ServiceNow CMDB beyond inventory and asset management. This allows users to streamline data collection across systems so that they can understand how the entire ecosystem is working at a glance, from infrastructure to applications, and then be immediately notified when changes occur. 

Inbound synchronization now uses Data Sources, Identification Rules, and Robust Transformations instead of Import Sets and Transform Maps. Along with that, all LogicMonitor data is now stored in a related data table, rather than extending base ServiceNow classes.

The LogicMonitor Service Graph Connector acts as a single source of truth for IT assets that are correlated to your alerting stream, significantly reducing mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR) for critical incidents. 

With the ServiceNow Service Graph Connector in LogicMonitor, you will be able to:

• Have a better understanding of overall service health: The Service Graph Connector allows users to monitor, visualize, and alert on the health of overall services rather than the health of individual monitored devices, ultimately increasing visibility into the whole ecosystem
• Sync bi-directional data: Deliver a single source of truth with real-time, accurate, and relevant details maintained in both LogicMonitor and ServiceNow. Not only does this encourage collaboration between IT Ops and Service Management, but it also helps improve overall CMDB health.
• Enhance alerting and insight: Generate meaningful dashboards as you add devices, combining data from across your infrastructure to create application or service-specific views. When you are able to visualize service dependencies and identify big picture impacts and anomalies, you can focus on incidents with the greatest impact on the business. CMDB data quality is further improved with Service Graph Connector with enhanced Identification and Reconciliation engine (IRE) in ServiceNow.
• Customize based on business needs: No IT environment is the same, so we make it easy to build on our powerful CMDB application architecture to meet the unique needs of your business.
• Leverage guided setup: With the new guided setup feature, users are able to get up and running quickly with an easy to follow checklist for setup 

To support these enhancements, a new dependency is required for the Service Graph Connector for LogicMonitor, including the ITOM Discovery license from ServiceNow. This is available for customers to download from the ServiceNow Plugin module. 

The Service Graph Connector for LogicMonitor is just the next step in strengthening our partnership with ServiceNow and continuing our product innovation for our mutual customers. Visit our store listing if you’d like to learn more about our ServiceNow integrations and it’s features and requirements. If you would like to request a free trial, sign-up here. 

Earlier this year we announced the official LogicMonitor – ServiceNow CMDB App, and it’s been exciting to see how quickly our customers are adopting the feature-rich integration. As with most workflow integrations across the LogicMonitor ecosystem, the CMDB App was built with customization in mind. Infrastructure intricacies vary across our diverse customer base and our Product team does a great job ensuring new features provide the powerful flexibility required to build and customize as needed.  

We’re constantly working with the ServiceNow team and our customers on creative use cases to enhance the CMDB App. Below are a few new feature updates to enjoy, available today.

Support for ServiceNow’s New York Release

We’re always impressed with the version releases from ServiceNow and New York is no different. LogicMonitor’s CMDB and Incident Management applications have already been certified by ServiceNow to work on their latest city release, available for public consumption today.

Double Down on Automation

Data may be king at LogicMonitor, but we love automation just as much. The sheer number of components and services that support one’s infrastructure and applications is staggering: hundreds or thousands of devices containing millions of potential metrics. With the massive amounts of data we collect, it’s impossible to scale without automation. How does this apply to the CMDB App?

Open Device in LogicMonitor from ServiceNow

Sharing data between ServiceNow and LogicMonitor is already helping many of our customers improve the health and accuracy of their CMDB, but sometimes you have to get your hands dirty and jump from one system to another.
In the original, out of the box code, LogicMontior writes a direct URL to the ServiceNow CI on the sn.cmdb_url property.

Added to this release of the base application there will be a new button on each CI synchronized with LogicMonitor that will open the LogicMonitor resource in your configured portal directly from ServiceNow. Say goodbye to tab jumping.

Auto Balanced Collector Provisioning

Device assignment to collectors has traditionally been a 1-to-1 relationship. The burden of managing those connections and ensuring that collectors are properly scaled and balanced fell to the customer. Device Creation also required a collector assignment. Deciding which Collector had the capacity to take on new devices takes creative guesswork on the part of the customer with the only guidance based solely on device counts.

Introducing Auto Balanced Collector Groups (ABCG). This functionality streamlines the creation process for devices, simplifying capacity management within a group of Collectors. Available today, the 1.1.x release and our Auto Balanced Collector Group – Update Set gives users the option to provision devices to ABCG instead of a specific collector. A few benefits of this include:

• Dynamically moving device(s) from one collector to another within the ABCG in order to prevent any individual collector from becoming over-subscribed.
• Improving scalability for device failover. When a collector in an ABCG goes down, the devices that were being monitored by that collector will be distributed among the other collectors in the ABCG.
• Streamlining the creation process for devices and allowing for simplified capacity management within a group of collectors.

A Configuration Management Database (CMDB) contains all relevant information about the hardware and software components used across an organization’s IT environment. Even more important, a CMDB defines the relationships and interdependencies between those assets. This makes it easy to understand, manage and report on the service being delivered.

However, a CMDB is only valuable if you’re working with reliable data. With thousands of devices being added across distributed systems, it’s easy for a business impacting issue to slip through the cracks.  

The LogicMonitor – ServiceNow CMDB integration eliminates the typical time-consuming data sifting across systems so you can understand how the entire ecosystem is working, from infrastructure to applications, and be immediately notified when changes occur.

It’s important to note that with this new integration, by default, nothing will synchronize out of the box. Don’t fret – we have good reason. Synchronizing data bi-directionally out of the box could be detrimental to your LogicMonitor resource, or CMDB data, which is why we have designed the application with deliberate safeguards. The code to synchronize devices and more is there; it just needs to be enabled, scheduled, triggered or in general told when to run. The following sections will cover how to set up the application.  

Initial Setup

Pre-Requisites

Before starting, make sure you have access to the following:

• ServiceNow account with the “admin” role.
• LogicMonitor account with rights to create User accounts and view all devices.

Create API Only User

Steps to create a dedicated API Only LogicMonitor user: 

1. Login to your LogicMonitor Portal with Admin level role.
2. Click Settings > Users & Roles > Add
3. Click button for “API Only”
4. Give account a user name of “cmdb_sync”
5. Assign Role with appropriate rights based on use case. (Administrator is recommended)
   • For full functionality the account will need the ability to:
     • View collectors
     • View/Add Devices
     • View/Add Groups
   • Additional rights may be needed based on your unique use cases.
6. Click the PLUS button to add a new API Token.  Retain the AccessID and AccessKey values for use in the ServiceNow CMDB application configuration (next section).
7. Click Save in the API Only section to save that key.
8. Click Save at the bottom of the window to save the API Only Account.

Install/Configure ServiceNow CMDB Application

This section provides steps to configure the CMDB application to connect to your LogicMonitor portal and test the connection.

Install the application to your ServiceNow instance.

1. Login to ServiceNow with admin level privileges.

2.  Navigate to System Applications > Applications in the ServiceNow menu.
3.  The LogicMonitor CMDB Integration should appear in your Not Installed list.  (If you don’t see the application please reach out to your LogicMonitor CSM or Account Exec.)
4.  Click “Install” once.

NOTE.  This will take a VERY long time.  Possibly as long as 30 minutes. DO NOT click the install button more than once!

If you want to check if the application is still installing, you can do the following:

• Navigate to System Diagnostics > Progress Workers
• There will be an entry for the application in a “Running” state.
• When it says “Completed” the application installation is complete.

After the installation has completed:

1. Navigate to LogicMonitor CMDB > Setup > Properties
(If you see a message about application scope click the “here” link to switch the Application Scope)
2. Set values for:

• LogicMonitor Account Name
• API Access ID*
• API Access Key*
  *from step 6 in Create API Only User

3. Click Save
4. Navigate to LogicMonitor CMDB > Application Components > Scheduled Jobs
5. Click on the job titled “LM – Collector Import”
6. Click the button “Execute Now”.  This will attempt to connect to the configured LogicMonitor portal and import all the Collectors into the newly established LogicMonitor Collectors CI Class.
7. Confirm that the connection has been established by navigating to LogicMonitor CMDB > Collectors

If the collectors are there Congrat
ulations!  The connection is working.

Next Steps:

• If you haven’t watched our introduction videos, please check those out here. It provides a lot of context and is a great preview of the initial setup and the application’s functionality, including how it ties in with our free ServiceNow alerting application.
• Everyone’s use cases for how they sync CMDB data are unique. This application is designed to be customized to meet your specific needs. We have a document available to you which provides more technical details on setup, configuration and customization. Please contact your Customer Success Manager to request this guide.
• CMDB data is important and LogicMonitor devices and monitoring data are equally important. Implementation of this application should be thoroughly tested using your non-production instances of ServiceNow and LogicMonitor sandbox accounts prior to rolling out to production.

As always, our Professional Services team is here to help. Reach out to the Professional Services email with questions or for assistance with implementation.