Ansible Service Now example

These playbooks are meant to run as a Workflow to demonstrate the use of Cisco IOS and Service Now collections from Galaxy and the Red Hat Automation Hub. Each Playbook can run in a different Python virtual enviroment (venv).

This workflow parses data from a Cisco IOS device to create and update an incident. The output should look like this in Service Now:

Dependencies:

Python libraries

pip3 install pysnow pyats[library]

Collections

ansible-galaxy collection install servicenow.servicenow
ansible-galaxy collection install cisco.ios

Roles

ansible-galaxy role install -r roles/requirements.yml

While both roles and collections can be specified in one requirements file, they need to be installed separately. The ansible-galaxy role install -r requirements.yml will only install roles and ansible-galaxy collection install -r requirements.yml -p ./ will only install collections. See Installing roles and collections from the same requirements.yml file.

Running the examples locally for testing

You can pass extra vars snow_instance, snow_user, and snow_password or export environment variables:

export SNOW_INSTANCE=<dev12345> # without '.service-now.com'
export SN_USERNAME=<admin>
export SN_PASSWORD=<password>

Run any of the playbooks:

⇨  ansible-playbook create-incident.yml 

PLAY [Using ServiceNow Collection] ******************************************************************************************************************************************

TASK [Create an incident] ***************************************************************************************************************************************************
changed: [localhost]

TASK [debug] ****************************************************************************************************************************************************************
ok: [localhost] => {
    "new_incident.record.number": "INC0010002"
}

To run the rest of them, you need to export the incident number you got.

export SNOW_NUMBER=INC0010002

Inventory

First, you need to export SN_INSTANCE, SN_USERNAME, and SN_PASSWORD. These identify your Service Now instance and credentials. For example:

export SN_INSTANCE=<dev12345.service-now.com> # with '.service-now.com'
export SN_USERNAME=<admin>
export SN_PASSWORD=<password>

1. You can grab the display your full inventory

   ⇨  ansible-inventory -i inventory-snow.yml --list
   {
       "_meta": {
           "hostvars": {
               "DataNoc_gw01_lanset_net": {
                   "sn_fqdn": "",
                   "sn_ip_address": "208.187.161.1",
                   "sn_name": "DataNoc.gw01.lanset.net",
                   "sn_sys_class_name": "Network Gear"
               },
               "IP_Router_1": {
                   "sn_fqdn": "",
                   "sn_ip_address": "10.0.0.1",
                   "sn_name": "IP-Router-1",
                   "sn_sys_class_name": "IP Router"
               },
               ...
           }
       },
       "all": {
           "children": [
               "group_IP_Router",
               "group_IP_Switch",
               "group_Network_Gear",
               "ungrouped"
           ]
       },
       "group_IP_Router": {
           "hosts": [
               "IP_Router_1",
               "IP_Router_2",
               "IP_Router_3"
           ]
       },
       "group_IP_Switch": {
           "hosts": [
               "IP_Switch_1"
           ]
       },
       "group_Network_Gear": {
           "hosts": [
               "DataNoc_gw01_lanset_net",
               "San_Diego_Gateway",
               "nc6500_a01",
               "ny8500_nbxs08",
               "ny8500_nbxs09"
           ]
       }
   }
   

2. Or see it as a graph based on the keyed_groups

   ⇨  ansible-inventory -i inventory-snow.yml --graph
   @all:
   |--@group_IP_Router:
   |  |--IP_Router_1
   |  |--IP_Router_2
   |  |--IP_Router_3
   |--@group_IP_Switch:
   |  |--IP_Switch_1
   |--@group_Network_Gear:
   |  |--DataNoc_gw01_lanset_net
   |  |--San_Diego_Gateway
   |  |--nc6500_a01
   |  |--ny8500_nbxs08
   |  |--ny8500_nbxs09
   |--@ungrouped:

In Tower, you will want to import this on Inventory sources. Have ANSIBLE_INVENTORY_ENABLED: auto as well as the other required variables in the ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES section.

Last, but not least, you can add hosts to your inventory with snow_record. Take a look at this example

Links

• Galaxy - Service Now
• Ansible + ServiceNow Part 1: Opening and Closing Tickets
• Ansible + ServiceNow Part 2: Parsing facts from network devices using PyATS/Genie
• Ansible + ServiceNow Part 3: Making outbound RESTful API calls to Red Hat Ansible Tower
• Governing Self-Service Cloud Provisioning
• Using inventory plugins
• Jinja2 to construct vars and groups based on existing inventory