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here is a new integration to our downloads page for those that need to receive alerts from Interlink’s Business Enterprise Server (BES).  This integration is structured just like any other alerting integration and follows the same process flow:

The BES server acts as the event generator in this scenario. Once it is configured to send applicable alerts to Service-now, it will arrive in a web service import set in Service-now.  Service-now creates an entry in a temporary table which is then mapped to a target incident and flags that incident so that the system knows that it was created by BES in order to send BES and update when the incident (alert) has been resolved.

The BES integration update set contains the following modules:

The only modules that need to be modified when this update set is installed is the Properties module and the Transform Map.  The properties module defines:

  • SOAP endpoint for BES server
  • Username / Password to access BES server
  • User that BES uses to authenticate into Service-now
  • An option to send data back to BES synchronously or asynchronously.

Inbound Alerts to Service-now

Most of the logic for receiving alerts is taken care of by the web service import set and the transform maps (modules found under the Soap Endpoint category).  If there is a need to modify any of the logic for receiving alerts, modifications will be done here using a graphical UI.  The BES SOAP Endpoint module defines what SOAP fields our system is configured to accept.  This will most likely remain the same.  The Transform map, however, will most certainly need to be tweaked to have the alert data mapped to fields that may be specific to your system.

If you are unfamiliar with Service-now transform mapping technology, it is a simple way for administrators to map data from an external source into a target table in Service-now using a drag and drop interface.  You can learn more about transform maps on the Service-now wiki – Transform Maps.

Outbound Alerts to BES

The BES integration is written to allow communication to the BES system to let it know when an alert has a new worklog entry or when it has been resolved.  The code that controls whether or not to send data to BES is in the Business Rule module

if (current.sys_updated_by.getDisplayValue() != gs.getProperty('com.snc.integration.bes_sn_username') ){
  if (bes_didMonitoredFieldChange()){
    var BES = new BESUpdater(current, gs.getProperty('com.snc.integration.bes_async'));
    if (current.u_work_log.changes()){
      //send incidentAddNote to BES
      BES.sendUpdate(current);
    }
    if (bes_resolvedOrClosed()){
      //send incidentClose to BES
      BES.closeAlert(current);
    }
  }
}

If it is desired to only communicate to BES when an incident has been resolved and not new worklog entries, then simply comment out or remove the line above that sends the worklog to BES.

That is all there is to it. Using this integration update set, it should be quite simple to use Interlink’s BES system with Service-now.