Inventory Tracking Made Convenient Through Integration

Posted on 09:28 AM - 29th Jun 2020

Overview

In this very device-centric world, everything operates on different devices be it mobile, laptops, desktops, or any other system. Every organization needs an end number of devices to operate because of which a lot of unmanaged devices are trickling into their environment. To solve the issue being faced by a client for Mac devices, we brought in Jamf Pro for the management. We improved the CMDB for configuration items, the process to import hardware and software into ServiceNow with the JAMF Pro into the ServiceNow CMDB.

Challenges

When there’s a wide range of devices, it tends to raise some issues in managing those devices. The common problems faced during the implementation of this integration include having the permissions for JAMF Pro Service Account, setting up Mid Server in the client network, and some host devices having multiple duplicates causing issues while importing via integrations.

Journey

For the successful integration of Mac devices, we began with creating properties for base URL API, username and Password for JAMF Pro Services after getting all the permissions required to operate those accounts. A technical approach was created to retrieve all the Mac Devices from the JAMF Pro into CMDB. Then the CMDB Identification was utilized along with the reconciliation of APIs in a transform map to remediate the duplicates and reconciliation. In the end, we created a scheduled job to import all the devices on a daily basis.

To finish off the process with testing, we ensured that all Mac devices were integrated successfully from JAMF Pro to ServiceNow CMDB for inventory tracking, no duplicated found after successful implementation of the integration, and asked stakeholders for data validation.

Result

The integration helped to enrich the CMDB with Mac devices present in the customer’s environment. It used a dashboard for reporting purposes and management to validate the data. The custom REST API integration eliminated the use of expensive plugins offered by the vendor.