Cisco Video Endpoint ServiceNow Integration

Ever wanted a way to allow users to create a ServiceNow ticket straight from the video room endpoint? Well you can. Using Macros and the new HTTP Post capabilities in CE9.7+, integrating to ServiceNow to raise a incident report is pretty straight forward. It has to be as I did it on my own endpoint!

In this post I am going to step through the UI and the macro in the order that stuff happens so hopefully it will explain how this all works together. Sometimes it is difficult to understand how code, UI interactions and the backend all work together. This should help layout exactly how it all works together to give a custom process flow to create a new ServiceNow Incident ticket.

Stepping through the UI, Macro and ServiceNow

The macro work has largely been done for us. This sample macro posted on DevNet's Github repository is a great starting point to build the process you want users to follow. The Touch 10 panel that gets created in the UI creation tool is nothing more than a simple button. Most of the actual work that gets done is by the macro. The macro is providing the logic for the screen/panel that is presented next in the flow based on the users selection. Finally the Macro posts the ticket number created by ServiceNow on conclusion of the process and presents the user with the incident number. Let's take a look at some of the more important sections of the macro to get a sense of what is happening.

Our process starts with the Touch 10 panel. The Report Issue button is nothing more than a button in the UI configuration tool.

Below is the In-Room Configuration tool view of the button. The button Id is "reportissue" which our Macro will use to identify which button was pressed.

Let us step through how it all works.

Step 1. The "Report Issue" button is pressed.

This step in turn generates an event by the codec we have subscribed to using the code below. In line 2 we identify the correct panel using the panel Id 'reportissue'. This goes on to launch the next UI element to the user.

--Script--

--Script--

Below is the multichoice menu our user is presented with based on the "UserInterface Message Prompt Display" options.

Step 2. Multichoice option selected.

Assuming our user has selected cleanliness as the issue, the feedbackId generated by that event is 1. The macro using the "UserInterface Message TextInput Display" command on line 6 after matching case '1' in the switch command generates the next step.

--Script--

--Script--

The user is given the option to add more details and submit the incident.

Step 3. Post Incident Ticket to ServiceNow on Submit.

When the user hits the "Submit" button the raiseTicket function is called which in turn calls the getSericeNowIncidentIdFromUrl function which is used to retrieve the ticket ID to post back to the user. Both of these functions rely on the new HTTP GET and POST features in CE 9.7+.

--Script--

--Script--

The users view of the ticket number. Although this is a practical way to show the user the ticket was indeed placed, the user now has to write this sucker down. An improvement on this script is to somehow automate getting this ticket number to the user, Webex Teams perhaps!

Here is our new incident ticket in the ServiceNow portal. So proud.

While running this as a Macro is pretty neato, running this as a server based application may provide more opportunities to add additional functions like emailing the user after they submit the ticket. In the macro above we are also using insecure https. This might be frowned upon by some security folks so using a server based version of this might help with additional security features like more secure https perhaps.

Something else to consider is what data you collect before you raise the ticket. Below is a snippet to grab the call details of the last call made. Once you have this you can add it to the ticket on the initial post. Other details like CE version, system name, IP address might also be worthy of collecting for the ticket to lower the amount of time someone has to spend manually collecting that data.

--Script--

--Script--

If your interested in building a server version of this project, I have a starter project you can check out at https://github.com/voipnorm/CESeNow. This project is a bit of a combo project as it has some additional code for pulling people presence and other data from an endpoint but all the code required to do this integration is incorporated. If you just want to take a look at the code the endpoint.js file is doing all the work.

For ServiceNow developer instance setup head to: https://developer.servicenow.com/app.do#!/home. Your developer instance is available for 10 days with no activity. Just be aware if it goes to sleep that reinitiating the instance may produce a different URL that you will need to update and may require a password update. Your password username combo has to be base 64 encoded so this will need to be updated as well.

This is a interesting project to put together and best of all it doesn't cost a dime. ServiceNow developer instances are free, you just need to sign up to their developer portal.

VoIPNorm