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co-worker asked me for some help yesterday fulfilling an interesting requirement. He needed to set up a configuration item reference field or catalog variable that would display a calendar macro that, when clicked, would open a popup window containing a change calendar report for that configuration item. I figured this idea might be of use to others so I’m posting it here!
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t should come as no surprise to you that, if used properly, your CMDB can be an extremely valuable input to your incident/problem/change processes. This is true not only of the actual CIs, but also the ‘Affected CI’ records that you create. ServiceNow gives you a couple of different places to track this information. The first is the ‘Configuration Item’ field available to all Task types in the system. You can add this field by personalizing the form for any task. The second is the ‘Affected CIs’ (task_ci) many-to-many table. This can be added to any task form in your system by personalizing the related lists for that form.
This setup allows you to track a primary CI or Business Service against a given task in the field on the form, and it also allows you to track multiple Affected CIs against a task if necessary in the related list. What I don’t like about this setup is that these are managed independently so there’s not a single place to see ALL of the Affected CIs in your environment. My solution to this problem has always been to centralize all of this information into the ‘Affected CIs’ related list by copying the ‘Configuration Item’ field value into it. This simple idea gives you a much better look into your Affected CIs for reporting, and allows for more proactive troubleshooting through CI Business Service Maps as an input into your task processes.
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ervice-now has a pretty simple one-way Outlook calendar integration that you can use to send out iCal meeting requests and updates to assignees involved with a Change request. I’m often asked if this functionality can be used for meeting invites in other tables as well. The answer is Yes! This hasn’t really been documented because it relies on some legacy technology that really isn’t that prominent in the system anymore. In this article, I’ll show you the pieces that make this calendar integration work by showing you how to set the integration up for the change task table.
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ervice-now.com provides a really cool Graphical Workflow engine to help manage workflows for different tasks. This graphical workflow engine is particularly useful when working with approvals for Change Requests. As a Service-now.com consultant I’ve found that change approvals usually fall into just a few different types but new administrators and consultants sometimes don’t know the best way to implement approvals. In this post I’ll share some of the common change workflow approval methods and scripts I’ve seen used before. I wouldn’t be surprised to see this list grow over time and I know I haven’t seen all of the common methods. If you have something you’ve used before please comment on this post or use the ‘Contact’ link above to send in your suggestion to share.
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common Graphical Workflow requirement in Service-now is to tell the workflow to wait for some trigger before continuing. The ‘Wait For condition’ activity is available out-of-box and is very simple to configure. Usually when working with Service Requests or Change Requests I am asked how you can set up the workflow to wait for completion of all associated tasks before closing the Request Item or Change Request ticket. This can be easily accomplished by using a script in your ‘Wait For condition’ activity to query for any associated tasks that are still marked as ‘Active’. If the task is marked as ‘Active’ then it hasn’t been closed yet and the workflow should wait for that closure. Here are some sample scripts that I’ve used before to wait for task completion on both Request Items and Change Requests.
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few months ago I wrote about copying change requests using a UI action. While that method works great, it does require you to specify each and every field and value that you want to populate into the new change request. If you’ve got a lot of fields to copy over then you might end up with a pretty big script and a lot of items to copy over. You also need to be aware of any new fields that get added after you create the script and make sure that they get copied if necessary.
The following method works in much the same way, but it copies by performing an insert against the current record (rather than starting from a brand new change record and supplying each value). Because of this, you’re concerned about overriding any of the values (such as start and end dates) that you DON’T want to be copied over from the record you are copying. This method works better if you know you want to copy over all (or the majority) of the field values from a given change.
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hange management in Service-now includes the use of a parent ‘Change request’ ticket and (usually) the use of multiple ‘Change task’ tickets that can be assigned to separate groups or individuals to perform specific pieces of work. Because these change task tickets should factor into the overall plan for the parent change request, it often makes sense to take the expected start and end dates of change tasks into account when setting a planned start and end date for the parent change request. The purpose of this script is to allow you to automate the calculation of the planned start and end dates for the parent change request based on updates made to the child change tasks. Whenever an update is made to the expected start or end dates of a change task, this script will run and evaluate the start and/or end dates of the other change tasks for the same change request. The earliest start date and latest end date from the tasks are then populated as the overall planned start and end dates for the change request.
“The requirement is to add an extra task to a set of tasks defined in a graphical workflow once it is running AND have a way of specifying the order AND have the new tasks start automatically when its predecessor completes and start the next on when it completes.
In the days of execution/delivery plans I had done this using a rule which set the new predecessor/successor entries but can anyone advise how to approach it with workflow?”
One of the great features of Service-now.com is its CMDB and relational mapping. You can easily set up relationships between any CIs in the system. Once the relationships are defined, it becomes very simple to pull up a visual representation of a CI and its dependencies by using Service-now BSM maps. Using this feature allows an end user to look at that CI and identify what else in the environment is impacted by an outage or a change to that CI.
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