ServiceNow Administration

• Posted by srikanth bollu May 26 - Filed in Technology - #servicenow  - 2 views

  ServiceNow administration deals with general support, administration and maintenance of the ServiceNow platform for the organisation.

  It also includes customising user interface, keeping versions up to date, configuration of applications and modules, managing security and user access, monitoring the system performance and doing regular health checks, managing workflows, UI policies, UI actions, etc.

  ServiceNow administrators are also responsible for setting up the ServiceNow, loading ServiceNow with the initial data, setting up groups, roles, users, SLAs, etc.

  ServiceNow Configuration

  The best way for the initial configuration of the ServiceNow is to use the “ITSM guided setup” application. Generally, only system administrators have access to ITSM guided setup application.

  ITSM guided setup provides a sequence of tasks that help you configure IT Service Management (ITSM) applications on your ServiceNow instance from scratch including company name, logo, colour combinations, fonts, banner, form layout, fields to be displayed in forms, lists, etc.

  Moreover, the ITSM guided setup also assists in configuring the major applications like Incident, Change, Problem, etc. To open ITSM guided setup, search ITSM in the navigation bar and open the first search result “ITSM guided setup” and click on the Get started button, as shown below.

  

   

  

  The entire setup is organised into categories like Company, Connectivity, Foundational data, CMDB, etc. We have to configure each category one by one using an interactive and guided menu. The completion progress for each category is displayed, beside the content frame and also, the overall completion status is displayed at the top of content frame.

  We can configure the category in any order and we can skip the configuration of any specific category as well. The task for the configuration of the ServiceNow from scratch is very big and, therefore, we can assign the task to configure each category to the individual admin user.

  

  The steps in guided setup are very detailed and self-explanatory. You can play around with the guided setup and try to configure the various categories. There are instructions and help available in every category for the reference.

  Import sets

  The import sets are used to import the data in ServiceNow from external sources like excel, JDBC, etc. The data is imported in the ServiceNow and then, mapped in the relevant ServiceNow tables. The data can be imported manually one time, or we can schedule the periodic import to happen automatically. Let’s discuss, both the imports one by one with the help of an example.

  Manual Import

  The data can be imported manually using the “Load data” module of “System import set” application. Let’s take an example, we have to import 5 groups in ServiceNow. The table, which stores the group in the ServiceNow is sys_user_group. To browse the data in this table, simply type “sys_user_group.list” in the navigation bar.

  

  Suppose, we have data of five groups in the excel, which we want to upload in the ServiceNow.

    ABC 1 Name Description Active 2 Oracle DBA ITSM group for Oracle DBAs True 3 Middleware ITSM group for Middleware Team True 4 File Transfer ITSM group for File Transfer Team True 5 MQ ITSM group for MQ Team True 6 Performance testing ITSM group for performance testing team True

  Open the “Load data” module for “System import set” application. In the import set table, click on the “Create table”, as we do not have any existing import table for importing user groups. The import tables are basically the intermediate tables or the staging table.

  As we import the file, the data is first loaded in this table and then, we can load the data from this import table to the actual target table in the ServiceNow (sys_user_group in this case).

  Then, give the name of the new table in the Label field. The important point to note here, is all the tables, which are created by the user, have the prefix of “u_” in the name and all the system tables of ServiceNow have prefix “sys_” in the name.

  Select the file from the explorer. Additionally, you can give the sheet number, which corresponds to the tab in the excel and header row (column name) in the excel. Both of them are “1” in our case. Finally, click on submit.

  

   

  

  Once the process is complete, you will see the above screen with state as complete and the next steps which have to be followed. First, let us go to the Import Sets under Next steps.

  

  You can see that the import set has been created with the state as “Loaded”, which means that the data in our excel file, has been loaded in our intermediate table “u_user_group_import”. You can check the data in this intermediate table, by searching u_user_group_import.list in the navigation bar.

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  Now let's move ahead and create a transform map for this imported data. In the transform map, basically, we create the mapping between intermediate table and target table (sys_user_group system table), that means which column of intermediate table corresponds to which column of target table, so that data can be loaded in target table accordingly.