Our brain continually sends messages all over our bodies, notifying us when we need to eat, sleep, or remove our hand from that stove. Could you imagine having to consciously ask your brain if you’re hungry, hurt, or tired? Life would be unmanageable. Our nervous system is a real wonder!
The same automation & notification system can also be at the core of your development projects. One way to get there is webhooks. Webhooks allow your applications to transfer data instantly and seamlessly to one another. As the number and capabilities of web apps grow, so does the important role played by webhooks in facilitating interactions among them.
The ServiceNow App from Cohesity makes it easy for administrators to manage different Cohesity workflows using a single pane of glass. Using webhooks, it lets you manage and resolve alerts from your Cohesity cluster on ServiceNow.
A webhook (also called a ‘web callback’ or ‘HTTP push API’) is a way for an application to provide other applications with real-time information. A webhook delivers data to other applications as it happens, meaning you get data immediately. Unlike typical APIs, which require you to poll for data very frequently to achieve real-time outputs. This makes webhooks much more efficient for both providers and consumers. The only drawback to webhooks is the difficulty of initially setting them up.
Cohesity’s ServiceNow integration makes it easy and intuitive to set up webhooks to receive alerts from the Cohesity cluster as ServiceNow Incidents, and you can manage the entire life cycle of these incidents as you would any other ServiceNow Incident.
With the latest release of the Cohesity ServiceNow App, we support single-click, end-to-end webhooks management. If you were set up webhooks manually, the process would involve at least three or four steps. Worse, any incident that is resolved on ServiceNow would also need to be resolved manually on Cohesity. With our ServiceNow webhook integration, you just need to take care of Incidents on ServiceNow and the Cohesity ServiceNow App takes appropriate action on the Cohesity cluster to resolve the Alerts.
Configure ServiceNow for Cohesity
When you configure your Cohesity cluster on ServiceNow, you can choose to set up a webhook (among other options). You can also select which Cohesity Alert types (Info, Warning, and/or Critical) you want to see on ServiceNow.
Figure 1: Cohesity Webhook in ServiceNow
Once you set up the webhook in ServiceNow, the Cohesity ServiceNow App sends an API request to the Cohesity cluster which configures the Cohesity cluster so that it starts supporting webhooks.
Figure 2: Cohesity DataPlatform Configured for ServiceNow Webhook
Once you complete this configuration, any Alerts that are raised on your Cohesity cluster are immediately raised on ServiceNow as Incidents.
Figure 3: Cohesity Alerts in Cohesity DataPlatform
These Incidents can then be resolved in ServiceNow, which also automatically resolves the Alert in the Cohesity cluster. The Incidents raised on ServiceNow are idempotent, that is, if an Incident is unresolved and the Cohesity cluster raises the same Alert again, a new ServiceNow Incident is not created.
Figure 4: Cohesity Alerts in ServiceNow Console
Learn more about our ServiceNow integration in the Developer Portal!
Reference
- What is a webhook: How they work and how to set them up, by Lenny Johnson, Vero
