How to Integrate ITSM software by Service-Flow

Integration Service | www.service-flow.com | flow@service-flow.com
How to integrate ITSM software?
Kai Virkki, 24.9.2013

Integration Service | www.service-flow.com | flow@service-flow.comIntegration Service | www.service-flow.com | flow@service-flow.com
Agenda
 ITSM integration challenges
 Different ways to integrate
 Service-Flow
 Lessons learned

Integration challenges: process
 Processes
– Probably different at both ends
– How to connect at the interface?
– There might be more than 2 parties
 Customer and n vendors is typical

Vendor
Customer
Simple example process
End user
creates
new
ticket
Create new
ticket
Transfer to
support
group:
Vendor 1
Create new
ticket
Assign ticket
Update ticket
information:
Status:
Assigned
Handle ticket
Resolve
ticket: Status:
Resolved
Update ticket
information:
Status
Update ticket
information:
Worklog
Update ticket
info: Status:
Solved
End
End
?? ?? ?? ??

Integration challenges: technology
– ITSM data:
 How to transfer?
 How to route?
 How to map?
 How to transform?
– What tools to use?
– ITSM software integration interfaces not very well
documented or standardized
– How to connect ITSM software that is usually located
inside corporate network, protected by firewalls etc?

Different integration styles
 Point-to-point
 Hub-and-spoke

Different integration technologies
FTP
SOAP
REST
Database
{JSON}

Let’s go through the most common
ones…
 Email
 File Transfer (FTP)
 Web services

Email Integration
Customer ITSM Software Vendor ITSM Software
Customer’s
Mail server
Vendor’s
Mail server

email
INCIDENT
ID: INC-1234
Subject: Printer broken
Description: My local printer
Category: 12
Status: Untouched
Customer: jorma@ankkalinna.fi
Creation Time:…
…

email
From: servicedesk@example.com
To: support@vendor.com
Subject: [Ticket #INC-1234] Printer broken
Body:
”Customer: jorma@ankkalinna.fi
Description: My local printer”
INCIDENT
ID: INC-1234
Category: 12
Status: Untouched
Creation Time:…
…
Many ITSM
systems can
transform tickets
to mail out-of-
the-box

email
Body:
INCIDENT
ID: INC-1234
Category: 12
Status: Untouched
Creation Time:…
…
TICKET
ID: TN-987
Title: Printer broken
Customer: Example.com
Worklog:
…
Many ITSM
systems can
transform tickets
to mail out-of-
the-box
Many ITSM
systems can
create tickets
from mail out-of-
the-box

File Transfer (FTP)
Customer ITSM Software Vendor ITSM Software
Vendor’s
FTP server

FTP
<incident>
<ID> INC-1234 </ID>
<Subject> Printer broken </Subject>
<Description> My local printer <Description>
<Category>12</Category>
<Status>Untouched</Status>
<Customer>jorma@ankkalinna.fi</Customer>
..
</incident>
INCIDENT
ID: INC-1234
Category: 12
Status: Untouched
Creation Time:…
…
TICKET
ID: TN-987
Customer: jorma
State: New
Category 1: AMS Services
Category 2: …
…
1. Generate some text
presentation of the
Incident
2. Write (XML) file to FTP
server
1. Read (XML) file from
FTP server
2. Transform customer
format to vendor
format
3. Translate data

Web services
Customer ITSM Software Vendor ITSM SoftwareAPIAPI

Web services
 ITSM vendor proprietary web services APIs
 Most reasonably modern software offer some
form of an API
– For inserting, updating and querying tickets

P2P Web services
1.1: Send ticket data to insert
1.2: Reply with ID (success)
n.1: Send ticket data to update
n.2: Reply with success

Can things be this easy?

email?

email
Body:
Category: 12
Status: Untouched”
INCIDENT
ID: INC-1234
Category: 12
Status: Untouched
Creation Time:…
…
TICKET
ID: TN-987
Category: ASM
State: Assigned
Customer: jorma
Customer ID: INC-1234
…
How about getting
something from the
mail body?

email
Body:
Category: 12
Status: Untouched”
INCIDENT
ID: INC-1234
Category: 12
Status: Untouched
Creation Time:…
…
TICKET
ID: TN-987
Category: ASM
State: Assigned
Customer: jorma
…
Or translating
category/status?

email
Body:
Category: 12”
INCIDENT
ID: INC-1234
Category: 12
Status: Untouched
Creation Time:…
…
TICKET
ID: TN-987
Category: ASM
State: Assigned
Customer: jorma
…
Or getting the customer
incident ID?

email
From: support@vendor.com
To: servicedesk@example.com
Subject: #TN-987# Printer broken
Body:
”Customer: jorma
Category: ASM…”
INCIDENT
ID: INC-1234
Category: 12
Status: Untouched
Creation Time:…
…
TICKET
ID: TN-987
Category: ASM
State: Assigned
Customer: jorma
…
What if vendor cannot
add our ID to subject
in correct format?
How then target the
correct incident?

FTP?

FTP
 Do the ITSM tools offer the functionality to
send/receive ticket to/from FTP?
– Most of them don’t
 Do the ITSM tools offer the functionality to
transfer to recipient format?

FTP
 Who is responsible of the FTP server?
 Did transfer to the other system succeed?
 How are files kept in correct temporal order?
 Who removes files when they have been
read?

Web services?

Web services
 Do the ITSM tools offer functionality to send
ticket data to other systems?
– Many of them don’t
 Do the ITSM tools offer functionality to
transform to recipient format?
 Do the ITSM tools offer functionality to handle
the response?

What then?

Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) to the
rescue!

ESB
Customer ITSM Software Vendor ITSM SoftwareAPIAPI ESB

ESB
Customer ITSM Software Vendor ITSM SoftwareAPIAPI ESB
ESB:
• Queries or receives tickets from
customer ITSM system
• Transforms to vendor format
• Sends to vendor using the vendor
ITSM software API
• Handles resends in case of
connections failures etc.
• Handles errors

ESB
 Who owns the ESB, customer or vendor?
 Integrations need to be implemented to
ESB, they don’t magically happen
– Adapters to ITSM tool APIs
– Transformations
– Translations
– Retries and error-handling
 Who understands the ESB logs when there are
errors?

Industry best-practice: ESB to every
Enterprise!
Customer ITSM Software Vendor ITSM SoftwareAPIAPI ESB ESB
Software X Software Y

Industry best-practice: ESB to every
Enterprise!
Customer ITSM Software Vendor ITSM SoftwareAPIAPI ESB ESB
Now we have 3 integrations to build!
• Customer ITSM software – ESB
• ESB – ESB
• Vendor ITSM software - ESB
Who builds the integrations?
Who supports them?

How about this?
Global Service Bus /
Message Broker

Global Service Bus / Message Broker?
 Take the great ideas of ESB and take them out
of the enterprise to the internet and offer as a
service
 ITSM Software has APIs, leverage them
– Ready-made adapters
 Robust queuing for highly-available and
reliable integrations
 Customers and vendors don’t need to manage
integration platforms and integrations

Service-Flow
 Not an integration platform, but a ready-to-
use service for ITSM integrations
 Secure, scalable, reliable and highly available
message brokering
 Offered as an SaaS from the cloud
 Customers can concentrate on their ITSM
tools and processes

Service-Flow: Broker
 Route messages (tickets creates/updates)
between parties with routing rules
 Routing rules selected based on message
sender and contents
 Map between the parties
– Different mapping types and formatters

Mapping examples: Copy

Routing and mapping examples:
Translate

TableTranslate

Template

Default

Service-Flow: Concepts
 Flow:
– An integration business case
 E.g. SAP Support outsourcing
 Conversation
– All messages related to the same tickets

Conversation example

Service-Flow: Operations
 The service is operated by the devops team
 No maintenance windows:
– Upgrades done live
– Usually once per week, but could be multiple
times per day
 Measured availability for individual service
components during last year at least 99,99%
– Less than 53 minutes downtime per year

Service-Flow: Security
 All network communications between ITSM
tools encrypted (SSL, 256bit).
 Deployed into a cloud Platform-as-a-Service
(PaaS) that runs on top of the Amazon cloud in
the EU.
 Amazon cloud is very secure and has
certifications to prove it:
– SAS70 Type II, ISO 27001, PCI DSS Level 1 etc.

Service-Flow Architecture
SaaS Provider Z
Secure Cloud Infrastructure
Service-Flow
Customer X
Network
ITSM Tool X
Customer Y
Network
ITSM Tool Y
ITSM Tool Z
SSL
SSL
SSL
Web
Browser
HTTPS
Adapter X
Adapter Z
Adapter Y
User
Interface
Broker

Example integration flow

Service-Flow architecture
Service-Flow
Vendor Y
Customer X
Efecte ITSM
Suite
ServiceNow
Web API
Direct Web
Services
Service-Flow
Efecte
Adapter
ServiceNow
Adapter
1: Create ticket

Service-Flow
Vendor Y
Customer X
Efecte ITSM
Suite
ServiceNow
Web API
Direct Web
Services
Service-Flow
Efecte
Adapter
ServiceNow
Adapter
2: Send Efecte
ticket XML to
Service-Flow

Service-Flow
Vendor Y
Customer X
Efecte ITSM
Suite
ServiceNow
Web API
Direct Web
Services
Service-Flow
Efecte
Adapter
ServiceNow
Adapter
3: Transform to
Service-Flow
internal format

Service-Flow
ServiceNow
Adapter
Efecte
Adapter
Vendor Y
Customer X
Efecte ITSM
Suite
ServiceNow
Web API
Direct Web
Services
Service-Flow
4: Select
recipient, map and
transform
data, keep track of
the ticket
conversation

Service-Flow
Vendor Y
Customer X
Efecte ITSM
Suite
ServiceNow
Web API
Direct Web
Services
Service-Flow
Efecte
Adapter
ServiceNow
Adapter
5: Transform to
ServiceNow web
services format and
send to ServiceNow

Service-Flow
Vendor Y
Customer X
Efecte ITSM
Suite
ServiceNow
Web API
Direct Web
Services
Service-Flow
Efecte
Adapter
ServiceNow
Adapter
6: Insert to correct
table, e.g. incident

Service-Flow
Vendor Y
Customer X
Efecte ITSM
Suite
ServiceNow
Web API
Direct Web
Services
Service-Flow
Efecte
Adapter
ServiceNow
Adapter

Service-Flow UI Demo

Lessons learned
 Processes from different organizations can be
hard to map together
– Good partners are needed to help with this
– KISS-principle (Keep It Simple, Silly!)

Lessons learned
 Most ITSM software isn’t built with
integrations in mind
– Those who design integration interfaces don’t
always have experience writing integrations
– File attachments are the Achilles’ heel of many
integration interfaces
– Integrating can be technically challenging, but
once it’s done, it can be reused as an adapter

Lessons learned
 It might take a long time to get network access
to an ITSM software inside corporate network
– There aren’t any great solutions to this, but
organizations starting to use SaaS ITSM tools helps
– Involve security and network people early in the
project

Lessons learned
 Many organizations are suspicious about cloud
services
– Cloud providers have to take security very
seriously and get applicable certifications and
audits to prove their trustworthiness
– How much can organizations really trust on their
own people and internal security?
– Fact of life: When doing B2B integrations, there
has to be some places, where data flows outside
company internal networks.

Thank you!
@kaivirkki
Mail: kai.virkki@service-flow.com

How to Integrate ITSM software by Service-Flow

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How to Integrate ITSM software by Service-Flow