5 Essential ServiceNow Integrations for ITSM
ServiceNow is a work platform and IT service management tool used by 85% of Fortune 500 companies. While it allows IT departments to control the flow of information, track incidents, and respond more quickly to urgent requests, they’ll always run into situations where they need to either hop from ServiceNow to other tools or use emails and chat messages to get all the data they need. Why? End users rarely go into ServiceNow. They submit a ticket through a portal, then get back to working in their own tool until they get an update on their request. On top of that, there are some essential tasks your IT department can only handle in other tools.
ServiceNow integrations are critical for giving everyone access to the most up-to-date information, allowing collaboration with less technical users, and streamlining communication.
Read on to learn more about these integrations and find out which ones you need for your ITSM process.
Why ServiceNow integrations?
IT service management (ITSM) is an umbrella term covering all processes involved in providing the best possible service to the rest of the business. It’s not just about receiving, assessing, and resolving tickets; it’s about making IT services feel as simple as possible for everyone involved.
IT workflows have historically been clunky and time-consuming, with end-users often waiting days — if not weeks — for an update on their IT ticket. Integrations connect departments and their tools to ServiceNow, helping set the right expectations and speed up the process of resolving important tickets.
With a properly integrated ITSM workflow, end users get automated updates without any extra work from your IT professionals. No more essential information falls through the cracks, customers get updates faster, and no tickets get lost.
What are your options for an ITSM integration solution?
When integrating ServiceNow with the rest of your tool stack, you have more than a few options. Some are built right into ServiceNow through Integration Hub, while others involve third-party platforms.
ServiceNow Integration Hub
ServiceNow’s Integration Hub allows your teams to build step-by-step integrations called “spokes” between ServiceNow and over 175 other tools, from Salesforce to DocuSign and ChatGPT. You can purchase packages of spokes and apply them one at a time to your ServiceNow instance, deploying them organization-wide. Each spoke serves as a single connector for one tool.
In many cases, the Integration Hub will be the first place you check for the integrations you need, especially if you just need a concise, scripted automation rather than a more in-depth workflow.
Automation tools
Whether it’s a deep automation service like Make or a simpler, more user-friendly platform like Zapier, these tools are some of the most popular ways to automate all kinds of workflows — including ITSM processes. They do have their limitations, but they can be hard to beat when it comes to onboarding your teams quickly.
Two-way sync integration platforms
A two-way sync solution like Unito doesn’t just allow you to create individual automations between tools; it creates true two-way relationships between work items in ServiceNow and a paired tool. That means any update made in one tool is automatically carried over to the next and vice versa with real-time updates.To replicate something similar with an automation tool — or the Integration Hub — needs several layers of automation and dozens of individually set triggers and actions. That means more moving pieces that can break or delay things.
Find out more about why two-way sync is the future of integration here.
5 essential ServiceNow integrations for ITSM
You know why you need to integrate ServiceNow with the rest of your stack and how you can do it. Now let’s cover what you should be integrating.
Spreadsheets
No matter how many tools your organization has deployed, there are tons of processes that still depend on spreadsheets. Reporting, project management, and accounting are just a few examples. Both IT departments and end users will see at least some of their work involve a spreadsheet somewhere. That means having a way to seamlessly sync ServiceNow data to and from spreadsheets is absolutely essential.
Examples of use cases
- Pushing records from ServiceNow to a spreadsheet report
- Pulling error logs and similar technical information from spreadsheets
- Updating incident status for teams that work out of spreadsheets
Examples of these tools
Project management tools
While your IT department might never need to open a project management tool in their daily work, colleagues in other teams likely do. One of the best ways to ensure they’re kept up-to-date is by making information available where they do most of their work. By integrating ServiceNow with project management tools, you can ensure every aspect of your ITSM processes run smoothly.
Examples of use cases
- Get crucial information synced between PM tools and ServiceNow
- Shareupdates on tickets, records, or incidents in project management tools
- Tag relevant IT tickets in tasks
Examples of these tools
Software development tools
When they think of ITSM, some might think of troubleshooting hardware or a stubborn operating system. But in many cases, IT specialists need to create or fix custom software solutions for end users, which involves using the same kind of tools that software developers rely on. Integrating these with ServiceNow can help ITSM leaders keep an eye on any software work that needs to happen in other tools, tying it to the appropriate records in ServiceNow.
Examples of use cases
- Flagging tickets for code reviews in version control tools.
- Managing backlogs in tools like Jira or Azure DevOps by tying them to ServiceNow records.
- Tracking development progress in software development tools, such as GitHub or GitLab, through ServiceNow dashboards
Examples of these tools
Knowledge bases
Your IT department’s knowledge base is an incredibly valuable resource. It isn’t just a database of information that helps you quickly solve some of the most common IT problems for end users. It centralizes updates and discoveries when dealing with new issues and sometimes can even close a ticket before any IT specialists need to get involved. This might be by forwarding the relevant knowledge base article, for instance. If you’re not using ServiceNow’s built-in knowledge base — maybe because your broader organization relies on a different tool for this — you’ll need an integration. By integrating ServiceNow with your knowledge base, you can make individual articles immediately available for end users as needed or update articles with data from ServiceNow tickets.
Examples of use cases
- Update knowledge base articles with ticket data
- Attach articles to relevant tickets
- Host read-only versions of knowledge base articles in ServiceNow
Examples of these tools
Other ticketing tools
While your IT department — or even your entire organization — might run on ServiceNow, that might not be the case for your end user. They might submit IT and other tickets through platforms like Zendesk or Intercom, especially if they use these tools for customer support and want to keep things centralized. That might make an integration between thes tools and ServiceNow absolutely essential.
Examples of use cases
- Surfacing IT tickets among other internal support tickets
- Enriching IT tickets with data from customer support tools
Examples of these tools
Get all your ServiceNow integrations in one place
Fully integrating your ServiceNow workspace with the tools both your IT professionals and end users rely on is essential to running more efficient ITSM processes. There’s only one platform that has all the integrations you need in a single platform with two-way syncing: Unito.
Want to see what Unito can do? Talk to our integration experts to find out!