“CICD” has been familiar for a couple of years now, but what does is it truly mean? Is it just continuous integration and continuous deployment? CICD is how fast code is moved between environments for enterprise users. IntegrationHub is one plugin that is growing widely in ServiceNow. This plugin offers both pre-build integrations for quick and easy ways of developing custom integrations by the usage of common protocols and package integration actions into user-friendly, reusable actions for use in Flow Designer.

To ensure a smooth integration process with IntegrationHub, understanding Flow Designer and why enterprises use Flow Designer with IntegrationHub is mandatory.

What is ServiceNow Flow Designer?

Flow Designer is a ServiceNow plugin that enables process automation capabilities in a user-friendly design environment. This plugin is not just specific to developers, it also allows even “process owners” to automate approvals, tasks, notifications, and record operations without writing any code. This acts as a helping hand to share the workloads of developers. 

Why Use Flow Designer With ServiceNow IntegrationHub?

• A single environment that is amalgamated with multiple platform automation competencies, so that process owners and developers can build and envision business processes and integrations from a single user interface.
• Provides the ability for process owners to create, operate and fine-tune flows.
• User-friendly language used to describe flows helps non-technical users to better understand.
• Technical users can create and publish actions that support automation in flows.
• Reusable actions in flow cut down development cost and also save time.
• Upgrade safe and reduces costs involved with ServiceNow platform replacing complex custom scripts.
• Allows extensions to IntegrationHub.

What is ServiceNow IntegrationHub?

Workflows automation requires integration of different applications, services, platforms, and data. The integration often becomes complex if the applications belong to legacy systems or apps. To simplify the integration process with robust integration solutions, ServiceNow platform offers IntegrationHub. 

ServiceNow IntegrationHub takes a load off of the development teams by permitting them to focus more on business logic than draining their efforts in the integration process. The IntegrationHub enables the development teams to extend service flows in the Flow Designer to any third party service and generate end to end integration, thereby resulting in hassle free digital workflows. 

The Benefits of ServiceNow IntegrationHub?

• Single environments that are consolidated with multiple platform automation capabilities so process owners and developers can build and visualize business processes and integrations from a single interface.
• With integration capabilities added to Flow Designer, it provides spokes for integrations with common IT tools.
• It is a low-code to no-code integration environment. With pre-built spoke readily available, common IT tools can be integrated by any process owner using natural language interface.
• Developers can use reusable spokes for integrations using REST, SOAP, Payload Builder, PowerShell, and script.
• Spokes can be created and published to ServiceNow store and ServiceNow Share.

How to Activate ServiceNow IntegrationHub

IntegrationHub is enabled with a separate subscription and requires Flow Designer to be installed too. In other terms IntegrationHub is an extension of Flow Designer that enables integrations with 3rd party APIs. The term “spoke” in IntegrationHub is used to refer to packaged integrations.

“Action” is a capability of Flow Designer that will be used in IntegrationHub too. The ServiceNow Action Designer environment allows users to create and edit actions by defining inputs and adding action steps.

A subscription to IntegrationHub adds Payload Builder, REST, PowerShell, and SOAP steps to the menu of available steps. (Payload Builder enables the creation of name-value pairs in JSON and XML.

Refer to the below video for details on how to re-create reusable integrations with ServiceNow IntegrationHub.

Orchestration vs IntegrationHub

ServiceNow Orchestration is a powerful system for managing IT and business processes quickly and reliably by automating simple and complex tasks on remote services, servers, applications, and hardware. There are cases where Orchestration needs to be used instead of IntegrationHub.  These instances include:

• When an instance is running a version earlier than Kingston.
• When changing an existing logic in a previously developed Orchestration workflows.
• When unsupported protocols are required that are not available in Flow Designer or IntegrationHub.
• An IntegrationHub spoke is not available for the target application, but an Orchestration Activity Pack is available.

About Author

Saketh Bijumalla works as a Sr. ServiceNow Developer with V-Soft Consulting. He is an  ITIL and ServiceNow System Admin Certified professional with 4 years of IT Experience and 3+ years of ServiceNow Development experience. He is knowledgable in Apache Cordova, Android Studio, brackets, and Python. He is well versed with JavaScript, Jelly, HTML, CSS & Python. Apart from these, he is very passionate about gaming and is pro gamer at FIFA.