Ansible & Servicenow - A DevOps Dream Team

IT departments are constantly looking for better ways to streamline processes and make their systems run more efficiently. While some choose to use Red Hat Ansible to run powerful automated processes across their IT infrastructure, it’s only with the ServiceNow Ansible spoke that they are able to further simplify, standardize, and improve processes. For those who are still looking to automate but are not currently using Ansible, it’s an open-source tool! It can be downloaded and installed from a myriad of sources. Other than that, only a Linux or Mac host with Python installed is necessary.

If you are looking to deploy applications, manage network devices, or provision servers in your infrastructure, you can do so by combining a .yml playbook and a ServiceNow Catalog Item to assist with these automations.

By combining these two, it produces a quicker turnaround to resolution which then allows requesters to see results much faster. The beauty of integrating Ansible with ServiceNow is that you can also utilize ServiceNow’s ITSM solution to trigger this automation from a Change Request, Incident, or any other record on the platform. By plugging in some approvals, you have control on when and what gets automated. To further expedite resolution, look at our ChatOps integration to further simplify this approval process. 

ServiceNow’s Flow Designer and the Ansible Spoke are dedicated to making implementations super simple. If you’re already using Ansible playbooks, you can launch these playbooks by referencing its ‘template_id’ and can even pass ‘extra_vars’ to the template to better customize the executed playbook. You are also able to pass Credentials to the Ansible action if your environment is set up to run Playbooks using specific credentials.

Webhook notifications can be configured to write back to ServiceNow updating on a success or failure after a playbook was executed by using Ansible Tower. This aids in tracking and resolving failures. By creating a task for a team to investigate the failure and a task to manually fulfill the request can improve the process and limit downtime in the case of an automation failure. 

If you would like to hear more about this integration and how your company could benefit from it, feel free to reach out to our RapDev team!