Rich Martin • 00:01

This demonstration will focus on showcasing how Itential enables infrastructure teams to rapidly build and easily expose network automations as a resource-facing service within the ServiceNow OMT ecosystem, facilitating product innovation and accelerated go-to-market, allowing providers to roll out new services to their end consumers with higher velocity. As you can see on this slide, we’re going to discuss how SMEs across different domains can take advantage of Itentials integrations and design capability in order to build automation, test automation, but also in a simplified fashion, expose that as a reusable, consumable asset, RFS within the ServiceNow OMT app. What we’re going to do next is walk through an example of how a SME within a particular domain can easily build one of these automations using Itentials Automation Studio and using the Self-Service Operations Manager application to publish that as an RFS within ServiceNow OMT. In this particular example, what we’re currently looking at is a pre-built automation that a SME has built in order to provide access connectivity across a network. As you notice, there are various different tasks that are happening here. Most of these tasks are automated tasks that include invocation of APIs, invocation of scripts, playbooks, and sometimes controller APIs. At the same time, you will also notice some data transformations built in in order to make sure we can manipulate data going from one system to the other.

Rich Martin • 01:41

As I called out early on, there are capabilities, integration capabilities that are called out here that all SMEs within the platform can take advantage of within their own domain to very easily create these automations before publishing them as a reusable asset. As you notice, there is a long list here, as you can see on the left-hand side. So if someone wanted to build additional automation on Azure or GCP or Infoblox, they can very easily do that, taking advantage of all the drag-and-drop tasks that are auto-generated within the palette here. What I’m going to show you next is this particular workflow that was built has an internal requirement as an input. So if I click on the start, you’ll notice it actually requires a region as an input. We have successfully published this particular automation as an RFS. What we’re going to do is go take a look at what an existing RFS looks like before we publish a brand new one.

Rich Martin • 02:45

So you can see how it all works. So what I’m going to do is navigate over to the ServiceNow OMT. And you’ll notice on the left hand side there’s something called service specification. So within the service specification, you’ll notice there is a long list of RFS that were already published by us. Namely, there’s a security rule panorama, there’s cloud infrastructure, and there’s access connectivity. Access connectivity represents the workflow that I showed you early on. So when I click on one of these, you’ll notice there’s a specification characteristics that was already identified.

Rich Martin • 03:22

In order for this RFS to be fulfilled, the end user or the product, when someone actually requests this product, has to provide this particular attribute. So what we’re going to do as the next part of the exercise is go back to the Itential Automation Studio. We’re going to actually pick another automation built by a load balancer SME. In this case, there are two automations that you can see on the left-hand side that were pre-built. I’m going to select the virtual server. Very often, application owners actually require load balancing for their infrastructure. In this case, a load balancer SME on F5 has successfully built out this very neat automation that also provides a lot of fallouts and best practices.

Rich Martin • 04:12

It has pre-checks, it has actual creation and provisioning, and it has post-checks. And it has a lot of capabilities where you can undo and redo some of these activities against a network. Now that we have built this out and tested that against our lab network and production network, we are ready to actually publish that so somebody else outside of this platform can take advantage of this capability. So what we’re going to do next is go into Operations Manager, which is ITENTIAL’s self-service portal, and we’re going to select a service that’s already available here, and we’re going to call it Publish. As you can see, this particular automation enables the SMEs within the ITENTIAL platform to publish their automation as RFSs. So in this case, I’m going to go ahead and request this. It’s going to ask me for a few pieces of information.

Rich Martin • 05:02

What I’m going to go ahead and do is call this thing out. Let’s call it FIP Creation Service. This service will enable the end-users to request FIPs. applications. We’re going to call this service now. And now, as an SME, I have the ability to pick and choose which workflow I want to expose as an RFS. So I’m going to go ahead and look for the big IP, create virtual server, which was a workflow I showed you early on. As soon as I select this, I’m going to go ahead and run this manually. In the background, it kicks off an automation, which will publish this particular flow as an RFS. As you can see, it has successfully done so. What I’m going to do is navigate back to OMT. As you can see, these were the characteristics for the access connectivity flow. I’m going to go back to the list. I’m going to refresh. As you can see, we have successfully published the VIP creation service as an RFS.

Rich Martin • 06:09

What this enables us to do is now we can go in within the actual service specification and see what are the characteristics. You’ll notice someone within ServiceNow did not have to manually create these specification characteristics. We actually, as part of our published plan, automatically generated and created this. What this enables someone within the OMT ecosystem to do is very quickly validate all of these and publish that as a consumable versioned RFS. Once this particular RFS is actually published, what happens is we can go and look at a product. A product makes for multiple RFS to be combined together where it requires multiple different things to happen within your infrastructure. Namely, in this particular example, there is a managed application hosting product which breaks down into us having to create infrastructure, provide access connectivity, which was the published RFS that I showed you early on, and also the security rule panorama.

Rich Martin • 07:17

At this point in time, because we also published the VIP creation, in the future, the owner of this product has the ability to enhance and version it and add the next RFS as a capability for their end consumers. So in addition to providing infrastructure, connectivity, security, now the product can also provide load balancing as an option. So, as part of this demonstration, you saw how easily someone can actually build an automation within the Itential Automation Platform, but also very easily and successfully publish that as an RFS within the ServiceNow OMT ecosystem.