September 29, 2021

The Service Graph Connector: What It Does & How it Works with Puppet

Ecosystems & Integrations
Products & Services

The Service Graph Connector is an integration between Puppet and ServiceNow that improves data accuracy and reliability across on-prem and cloud infrastructures.

Want to understand how the Service Graph Connector works and the benefits it carries for Puppet and ServiceNow customers? Let's dig into the details.

Table of Contents

  1. What is the Service Graph Connector?
  2. The Benefits of Using the Service Graph Connector for Puppet
  3. How the Service Graph Connector for Puppet Works
  4. Other Puppet and ServiceNow Integrations: Self-Service
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What is the Service Graph Connector?

ServiceNow's Service Graph Connector is a tool that lets organizations integrate their CMDB with other data sources. This integration ensures that the CMDB stays up-to-date and reflects the state of the organization's IT infrastructure.

It can be challenging to manage enterprise infrastructure across hybrid cloud and on-premises environments with accurate and timely tracking asset details — especially if you don't know what you have.

The more systems deployed, the more visibility is necessary for your IT operations teams to successfully meet critical service level agreements (SLAs).

The Service Graph Connector for Puppet, Explained

The Service Graph Connector for Puppet automatically populates the ServiceNow CMDB with real-time configuration management data from Puppet (called configuration items or CIs). That includes details on nodes, configurations, relationships, and other information about infrastructure managed by Puppet.

That's where the Service Graph Connector for Puppet comes in. Available on the ServiceNow Store, the Service Graph Connector for Puppet ingests data from Puppet Enterprise directly into ServiceNow’s configuration management database (CMDB) to give you and your teams rich, relevant data to make informed decisions across your on-prem and cloud infrastructure.

With the Service Graph Connector, you can increase the data share frequency and wealth of information on each resource in the form of Facts. In Puppet, Facts are collections of system information such as CPU, memory, or operating system version, all collected by the Puppet Agent and shared directly into the ServiceNow CMDB for real-time data advantage.

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The Benefits of Using the Service Graph Connector for Puppet

The benefits of the Service Graph Connector for Puppet include greater speed and reliability of data ingestion into your CMDB. Having more accurate data promotes consistency and efficiency across your IT operations.

The incorrect mapping of configuration items (CIs) in your CMDB can lead to data security issues and conflicting information. When you have accurate configuration data, trust increases across your IT operations team and improves the overall service quality of the business.

Puppet Enterprise and ServiceNow administrators also have tighter collaboration with consistent and real-time data insights to deliver more accelerated time to value.

The Service Graph Connector for Puppet enables has plenty of benefits, including:

  • Streamlined mapping of configuration data to offer better insight into misconfigurations and data security risks
  • Rich, relevant data to enable actionable decision-making
  • Full stack visibility into configuration components
  • Enhanced workflows based on data availability
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How the Service Graph Connector for Puppet Works

The Service Graph Connector for Puppet is certified by ServiceNow and provides accurate and relevant data into your CMDB. Facts are pulled from nodes on a scheduled cadence and stored in association with the relevant CI in the CMDB.

Incoming data can also be transformed using ServiceNow’s built-in data transformation features for directly updating CI attributes with up-to-date information from Puppet Enterprise.

This united approach empowers customers to tap into existing CMDB resources to make more informed decisions, decrease integration deployment times, enhance auditability, and reduce risk in your IT environment.

Puppet and ServiceNow seamlessly synchronize data behind the scenes into the CMDB, as illustrated below in the following steps:

  1. The Service Graph Connector for Puppet will retrieve facts from Puppet Enterprise’s database.
  2. The Robust Transform Engine (RTE) and Identification and Reconciliation Engine (IRE) in ServiceNow will transform the facts into attributes and identify new or existing records, inserting them into CMDB CI tables or updating existing records. 
  3. The Service Graph Connector for Puppet will take a configured set of facts per node and transform them into existing global CMDB CI service tables.
  4. The IntegrationHub ETL is what constructs the Service Graph Connector. This is an import set that points to a data source. The data source is Puppet Enterprise’s database (configured through a connection alias), enabling you to connect securely to Puppet Enterprise. The data is then transformed and mapped into the global classes.
A Puppet and ServiceNow integration diagram illustrating how the Service Graph Connector for Puppet takes data from Puppet Enterprise's database and imports it into ServiceNow's CMDB.
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Other Puppet and ServiceNow Integrations: Self-Service

The Puppet Spoke, a certified integration available on the ServiceNow Store, gives DevOps teams self-service workflows to manage Puppet assets directly from ServiceNow’s Service Catalog.

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