Connecting Blink to ServiceNow

Integrate your ServiceNow profile into Blink

Updated over a week ago

ServiceNow is one of the applications which requires configuration by a Blink administrator before employees can choose to enable it for themselves.


There are three steps to complete:

💡 Helpful Hint

You will need to be an Admin in Blink and hold the ServiceNow Administrator role on your ServiceNow instance to complete this configuration!

⏫ Import the Blink Update Set into your ServiceNow instance

Before you begin, open the config page for Blink's ServiceNow app in the Blink admin panel. Choose My apps and select ServiceNow. Also, open your ServiceNow instance in a web browser and login as someone with the Systems Administrator Role.

An Update Set is ServiceNow terminology for an XML configuration file. The Blink Update Set contains our endpoint addresses and a few other bits of config, such as, which ServiceNow events to send to Blink.

  1. Download the Update Set from this link

  2. In ServiceNow, navigate to System Update Sets, Retrieved Update Sets and click Import Update Set From XML to upload the file.

  3. Press Preview to view the contents of the file, and then Commit to save the changes into your ServiceNow instance, once done you should see something similar to the image below.

Note that the state is committed because you previewed and committed the Update Set. It's easy to miss those two steps so don't forget!

🆔 From ServiceNow, generate a Client ID and a Client Secret for Blink to use

The Client ID and Client Secret permit Blink to connect to your ServiceNow instance and take action on your behalf when you ask it to.

  1. As a ServiceNow System Administrator, navigate to System OAuth

  2. Go to the Application Registry and create a new entry for Blink

  3. When prompted for the type, choose OAuth API endpoint for an external client

  4. Enter Blink as the name and hit submit.

Blink will now appear in the list of endpoints. Click on it to view the endpoint details and take note of the Client ID and Client Secret strings for use in the next step. Also, fill in the Redirect URL field with the Redirect URL displayed on your Blink ServiceNow app page.

💻 From Blink, copy the Webhook Secret and Auth ID strings for ServiceNow to use

  1. Head to the ServiceNow config page in Blink and complete the form by filling in the URL of your ServiceNow instance along with the Client ID and Client Secret strings generated from the previous step.

  2. Click Connect

  3. Two additional fields will now appear for the Auth ID and Webhook Secret. Make a note of them.

  4. In ServiceNow, navigate to System Properties. From there, select Categories, then Blink, and create two new system properties called blink.auth_id and blink.webhook_secret with the values you noted above.

  5. Once complete, you should have three Blink properties configured in total.

Conclusion

Congratulations, you're all done!

Your employees will now be able to enable the ServiceNow app, receiving alerts on new tickets and gaining the ability to manage them directly from the Blink Feed!

To test this feature, add ServiceNow as an app to your feed, sign in with your regular user account and use a different account to assign a ticket to one of your ServiceNow assignment groups. You should immediately receive a news feed item that you can act!

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