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Is it possible to force SolarWinds NPM/NCM to fetch its device list from ServiceNow CMDB?

Hi there,

Currently we have 2 kind of source of truth in our organization, ServiceNow CMDB and SolarWinds device list. We need a single Master Device List (MDL).

SolarWinds NPM/NCM cannot be a good CMDB by itself, because it has a layer 3 point of view. So, if we have a stack of 3 switches, it’s seen as a single entity in SolarWinds NPM, or Nexus FEX are not recognized independently in SolarWinds.

Also, people usually remove decommissioned devices from SolarWinds, while it must not be removed from CMDB for record keeping.

Is there anyway to treat ServiceNow CMDB as the MDL and then integrate and force SolarWinds to fetch its subset of active devices from ServiceNow and not discover them via SNMP? I can assign a tag to those devices I need to monitor in ServiceNow CMDB.

Thanks.

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Accepted answers

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ioan_bucsa

Short answer: Without any customizations, not really.

Longer answer: There are a few possibilities:

- Write custom code that periodically queries the ServiceNow API and pulls CIs based on status (or other fields)

- ServiceNow has a functionality called Business Rules and this allows you to run custom JS code (post to SolarWinds API) based on CI events (on add, on update, on delete). See: send POST request when a business rule is activated - Developer Community - ServiceNow Community

We are basically at the same point and considering the two options.

mesverrum

We do a little of both right now, every day I scrape the CMDB for a subset of the CI's that were created in the last 24 hours to build a discovery job and get them added in.

On the decom side they run a script with the calls to to Solarwinds API to unmanage decommed CI's and we have a cleanup script on our side to delete any objects unmanaged objects after X days. Our biggest problem for some time was that the team who handled automatic CI discovery in SNOW made a real mess of things for a few months where they were creating a sea of duplicate CI's so I had to add a bunch of logic in to ignore their mistakes. Things on their end got so bad for a while that I was telling my manager I was going to transfer to their team to fix all the things that our SNOW team was screwing up but fortunately it didn't have to go that far.