CommVault and Service Now Integration

Hey @AlanMChristensen !  I’m assuming you have already checked out the documentation we have for integration based on the above.

I’ll monitor the thread for feedback from anyone else responding and see if I can get some dev/products eyes here as well.

The documentation is lacking in this area as this integration was rushed to market.. (even though it took a a full year) but more importantly my account team doesn’t understand my need for this integration to exist.  I spoke with the Aussies and drove home my vision to have a bottom up approach where the client already knows who it belongs to… only to rejoin the next call six weeks later to find out the “vision” from CommVault had completely changed.  I’ve asked the question what’s the difference between FP 14/15/16 and 20/21/22 that makes this “supported” and no one had an answer.  If it’s just about querying the MID servers x1 x2 x3 x4 why was this not supported in March of 2020 as I was originally told it was?  There is a lack of communication going on. 

Hi @AlanMChristensen,

I don’t know the history of your implementation and the challenges you have faced along the way, as well as I haven’t been part of any discussions around “how to implement best” - but I would really like to try to help you, so that you can get to your desired outcome and - eventually - get happy :) 

So let me please take a step back here and ask you - what do you want to achieve? I take from your post that you have a multi-commcell environment, and you would like to integrate with Webconsole (or Command Center I guess) to have SNOW trigger or execute tasks in Commvault. What I don’t understand yet is, what exactly do you want to do? Could you describe in a little bit more detail what the desired outcome is?
 

I understand you already spoke to our personalization team (I guess “the aussies” refers to them) - but as you said - there may be a lack of communication or to say it more positively - some room for improvement here. So although I can’t promise you to magically make all your challenges go away, I would still like to help you - and the better I understand what your requirements and your goal are, the better I can either help you myself our point you in the right direction.
 

Best regards,

Christian

Question 1.  What made multi-commcell implementations supportable in FP21 if all we do is query each commcell?

Question 2.  Why do I have to keep a massive repository of stale data inside Service Now when I could just be querying the CommServe directly?

Hi @AlanMChristensen 

again - I’m sorry to say so but I don’t know the history here. 

@1: Commvault Commcells are completely separate entities - of course we will need to query each Commcell if you want to work with multiple Comcells

@2: Sorry to say so - but I need to understand what you want to do first before I can even try to give you an answer here. But - what is keeping you from querying the Commserve directly? The Commvault Out-of-the-box integration may possibly not be what you are really looking for or needing ...

The client knows what it’s commserve is… so if you were to query using the client it would know its own name and its CS name eliminating the need for almost anything else.  Say you wanted a check readiness button in Service Now you could just build a small script that took something like the hostname of the box and the CS name from the registry.  You wouldn’t need to account for any other variables other than what each endpoint already knew about itself… it seems way less convoluted.. 

As far as I know the Commvault integration does not have a check readiness button - but this should be pretty easy to implement. As you just said - the Client knows it’s own name and the Commserve. So you would just need to call this REST API (GET call… really simple):

http://WebConsoleHostName/webconsole/api/Client/{{clientId}}/CheckReadiness?network=true&resourceCapacity=true&includeDisabledClients=true&NeedXmlResp=true&ApplicationReadinessOption=1

To determine the clientId you could use the “Get ID” API :

http://WebConsoleHostName/webconsole/api/GetId?clientname={{clientName}}

These and many more APIs are documented at https://api.commvault.com

So what is keeping you from just using these APIs ?

My local account team says this isn’t supported.

I’ve asked my account team to reach out to you and see if you can help us build a bridge to a supported solution! 

Tight integration of CommVault console and Service Now will be a killer for CommVault.  

All companies will have a compliance need, where we need to have tickets opened for a backup failure.

if i can see that commvault automatically trigger a snow ticket and list those tickets back on my commvault console, it will be very cool.

Right now, we do this with scripting and obtain a failure report.  Commvault should develop this tight integration

@Kris Agree that there is always scope to improve integration. Just so you are aware of what can be done right now though, it is a bit better than scripting. With a basic Commvault Workflow configured against one or more alert to open/update Incidents in ServiceNow and record the incident details within Commvault. Couple that with a basic Commvault Custom Report then you can get incidents opened against the failed backup jobs. You can then have ServiceNow call Commvault to update the recorded status of that incident in Commvault if you wanted. Another thing customers do is have the workflow use the audit note on clients to record Incident details on the Client so they can be viewed in the console. Workflows and APIs