ServiceNow alert channel

To send alert notifications from Instana to ServiceNow in real time, create a ServiceNow alert channel.

Creating a ServiceNow alert channel

To create a ServiceNow alert channel, click Settings > Team Settings > Events & Alerts > Alert Channels > Add Alert Channel in the Instana UI.

ServiceNow Alert Channel

The integration uses the basic authorization method to interact with ServiceNow REST API.

  • The URL field needs to point to the incident table in the Table API of your ServiceNow instance, such as https://foo.service-now.com/api/now/table/incident. The incident table can be looked up in the REST API Explorer of your ServiceNow instance.

  • The Username field needs to be the name of an existing ServiceNow user on behalf of which Instana will create incidents in ServiceNow. This user will appear in incidents' activities as the opening incident. The user needs to have at least the itil base system role in ServiceNow. This role is required to open incidents.

  • The Password field needs to contain the password of the ServiceNow user whose username was entered in the Username field.

Alerting examples

The following information is added to the Description field of the ServiceNow incident ticket:

  • The Short description field of the incident will be set to the title of the event as it appears in the Instana UI. The State field of the incident will be set to New.

  • The Impact field is set depending on the severity of the event in Instana. Incidents for events that are detected with the type online, offline, and change have the 3 - Low impact. For events with the type issue, incident, and monitoring issue, the value of the Impact field depends on their severity in Instana. Events with the Warning severity in Instana have the 2 - Medium impact, and events with the severity Critical have the 1 - High impact.

  • The Description field is set depending on the event type. In general, it includes most of the information that is sent by using other Instana alert channels. The information is represented in Key: Value format, with -- denoting nesting of the key/value pairs.

On open issues or incidents

See the following example of the Description field of an incident that corresponds to the event with the issue type:

ServiceNow Issue Incident Description

On close issues or incidents

ServiceNow incidents are not automatically closed or resolved when corresponding events are closed in Instana.

On online, on offline, or on change events

See the following example of the Description field of an incident that corresponds to the event with the Online type:

ServiceNow Online Incident Description