How to integrate ServiceNow with Cisco Webex using Webhooks

In the last 3 posts, we have covered everything from what Webhooks are and how they can be used with popular collaboration platforms like Cisco Webex and Microsoft Teams to generate event notifications. I am concluding this series with this post where we are going to take everything we have learned so far & build something that can solve a real production problem faced by Operations teams. In this post, we will go over the process of creating Business Rules in ServiceNow and use it along with ServiceNow’s outbound REST functionality to mimic the behavior of a traditional outbound Webhook. On the opposite side, we will be using Cisco Webex’s incoming webhook to receive the message being sent by ServiceNow. The table of contents is given below. You can click on the link to jump to the relevant section.

1. Sample Problem Statement
2. Setting up ServiceNow Instance
3. Configuring ServiceNow Business Rules
4. Final Webhook Demonstration

I have linked my previous articles from this series below. I would request you to go through them first so that you are clear on the working principle of Webhooks and their relationship with modern collaboration platforms.

1. Introduction to Webhooks
2. Setting up Outgoing Webhooks with MS Teams
3. How to use Incoming Webhooks with Cisco Webex

Sample Problem Statement

An organization is using ServiceNow as their primary ticketing tool to log incidents & service requests. The tickets are categorized under different priorities based on the severity level of the issue. From support point of view, it would behoove us to have some sort of a mechanism where the Operations team is notified of every high priority ticket (P1/P2) as quickly as possible. This can be accomplished in one of the following three ways:

1. Super Inefficient – You can monitor the ticket queue continuously & take action as soon as you see any P1/P2 ticket in the queue.
2. Mildly efficient – You can choose to be notified via an email from Service Now when a P1/P2 comes into the queue.
3. Most efficient but requires $$$ – You can integrate Service Now with third party applications like PagerDuty which can notify the team’s point of contact via phone call or a text message.

All of the above mentioned three methods suffer from some challenge or the other. The first method is cheap but lacks efficiency while the third method is super efficient but requires additional money. What if there was a way to implement a method which is not only extremely efficient but also doesn’t cost anything extra ? This is where the power of Webhooks can be exploited alongwith Service Now and collaboration platforms like Webex/MS Teams.

Setting up ServiceNow Instance

If your organization has some sort of a dev environment already then you can use its Service Now to setup & test the following configuration. If that’s not available, then you can setup an account on Service Now developer network and spin up your own personal instance for testing.

• Go to https://developer.servicenow.com/
• Click on “Request Instance”.

• Select the Service Now release that you want to use to build your solution and click on “Request”.

It will take a few minutes at the end of which you should have the login details for the newly launched instance. You can either click on “Open Instance” directly or click in the URL and login with the username/password information provided here.

At this point, you should see something like the following

Configuring ServiceNow Business Rules

• In order to setup a “Business Rule”, go to All –> System Definition –> Business Rule

To explore the rest of the article in detail, please head over to the following link