Send Dynatrace notifications to ServiceNow

For ServiceNow, Dynatrace offers:

Incident integration
Configuration Management Database (CMDB) integration via ServiceNow-provided application
Event integration

To connect your Dynatrace monitoring environment to your ServiceNow instance, configuration is required both on the ServiceNow instance and in the Dynatrace web UI.

Incident integrationCMDB integrationEvent integration

Once you configure Dynatrace Incident Integration, Dynatrace automatically creates an incident within your ServiceNow instance for every auto-discovered problem.

How it works

Dynatrace Incident Integration pushes incidents from your Dynatrace environment to your ServiceNow instance.

Configuration in ServiceNow

Go to Dynatrace Incident Integration page in the ServiceNow Store and select Get to install Dynatrace Incident Integration in your ServiceNow instance.
Follow the Guided Setup for an initial configuration of the application.
After the application is installed, go to the new Dynatrace Incident Integration menu on your ServiceNow instance to further configure (Setup, Settings) and explore (Problems, ServiceNow Incidents) the application.
Use the Transform Map module to transform the incoming Dynatrace data in the Problems import set table into an Incident table. The Problems import set table automatically transforms any incoming Dynatrace detected problem into an incident within the ServiceNow incident table.

Configuration in Dynatrace

After installing and configuring Dynatrace integration on the ServiceNow side, switch over to your Dynatrace environment.

In the Dynatrace menu, go to Settings and select Integration > Problem notifications.
Select Add notification.
Select ServiceNow from the available notification types.
Enter the requested information as described on the Problem notifications page.

Placeholders
The Available placeholders section of the configuration page lists placeholders you can use in the Description field to customize the text message associated with the problem notification. Placeholders are automatically replaced with problem-related information.
Turn on Send incidents into ServiceNow ITSM.
Select Send test notification to make sure your ServiceNow integration is working.
Save changes.

Workflow

After configuring the application on both sides, problem notifications are pushed from Dynatrace to your ServiceNow instance.
The Scripted REST APIs module is the entry point of the Dynatrace information into ServiceNow. It pushes the data into the Problems import set table.
The Problems import set table automatically transforms any incoming Dynatrace-detected problem into an incident within the ServiceNow incident table.
When a problem is closed in Dynatrace, the incident is marked as Resolved in ServiceNow.
Incident Integration flow

ServiceNow offers a dedicated Service Graph Connector for Observability application for pulling Dynatrace observability information into your CMDB. The purpose of this direct integration is to sync Dynatrace-monitored applications, services, and hosts with your service graph and your existing CMDB.

This Service Graph Connector application is developed and supported directly by ServiceNow. Please refer to ServiceNow support and help pages for the latest changes.

The functionality described below replaces the deprecated Dynatrace Service Graph Connector app, which has not been supported since January 1, 2022.

How it works

The ServiceNow connector uses the Dynatrace Monitored entities API v2 to pull information about applications, services, and hosts directly from your Dynatrace environment.

The connector runs a list of Integration Hub data stream actions utilizing data sources (SGO-Dynatrace) within your ServiceNow instance to pull all necessary information on a regular schedule.

The scheduled jobs are added by the connector app.

Dynatrace configuration

To secure communication between Dynatrace and ServiceNow, you need an API token. If you don't already have one, create an API token.

In the Dynatrace menu, go to Access tokens.
Select Generate new token.
Enter a name for your token.
Find and select the Read entities scope.
Select Generate token.
Select Copy to copy the generated token to the clipboard. Store the token in a password manager for future use.

ServiceNow configuration

In the ServiceNow marketplace, go to Service Graph Connector for Observability - Dynatrace and select Get to install the Service Graph Connector application within your ServiceNow instance.

As a part of this installation, you need to install the following plugins.
- Configuration Management for Scoped Apps (CMDB)
- Integration Commons for CMDB (from ServiceNow Store)
- Configuration Management (CMDB)
- ITOM Discovery License
- CMDB CI Class Model (from ServiceNow Store)
- Observability Commons
- IntegrationHub Data Stream Action
The above dependencies are mandatory for this integration to work. For information regarding Subscription Unit consumption, see ServiceNow Subscription Unit Overview.
Follow the Guided Setup to configure the application and the connection to your Dynatrace monitoring environment.

For existing users of the integration, we recommend that you uninstall any previous version of Dynatrace integration. There is no loss of CMDB integration data collected before the uninstall.

CMDB integration flow

The integration for Dynatrace SaaS and Dynatrace Managed are as follows.

Dynatrace SaaS

Dynatrace Managed

Class mapping hierarchy

If your ServiceNow instance has IT Operations Management (ITOM) enabled, all single events within a Dynatrace-correlated problem can be pushed to your ServiceNow ITOM event table (em_event).

ITOM pushes all the events of a problem detected by Dynatrace to the ServiceNow ITOM event API.
Event integration doesn't require downloading any application and can be enabled in the UI.

ServiceNow configuration

The ServiceNow ITOM module and license need to be active to use this integration option.

Dynatrace configuration

In the Dynatrace menu, go to Settings.
Select Integration > Problem notifications > Add notification.
In Notification type, select ServiceNow.
Enter the requested information and turn on Send events into ServiceNow ITOM.

In the Description field, you can customize the text message associated with problem notifications by combining any of the placeholders from the list below the description field in an order that's relevant to you.
Select Send test notification.
Save your changes.

After enabling the push of ITOM events, all events for any problem detected by Dynatrace are automatically pushed to the ITOM event API.

View events

Each host-based event has the node name and IP attached, as well as important severity information.
You can create event filters and alerting rules to flexibly react to incoming Dynatrace-detected events.
Each of the events contains the unique Dynatrace identifier (for example, HOST-B66B773D12C49189) in the correlation_id field. If the default ITOM Configuration Item (CI) mapping isn't able to match a CI by its node name, this correlation_id is used to automatically map detected CIs.

Event integration flow

Troubleshooting

Dynatrace-detected hosts, process groups, applications and services don't show up in the CMDB

To allow Dynatrace to report discovered CIs in your CMDB, verify that the discovery data source SG-Dynatrace exists. To do this:

Go to System Definition > Choice Lists.
In the Value field, enter =SG-DYNATRACE and run a search.
If you get no results, select New.
Create a new entry with the following details.
- Table: Configuration Item [cmdb_ci]
- Element: discovery_source
- Label: SG-DYNATRACE
- Value: SG-DYNATRACE

If the hosts, process groups, services, and applications still don't show up in the CMDB, check the ServiceNow system log for error messages within the identification engine. It might be that a non-standard CMDB-type attribute has been defined as a mandatory field.

Dynatrace-monitored servers don't show up in the CMDB

When Dynatrace-monitored servers aren't showing up in the CMDB, verify that:

Host synchronization has been enabled in the ServiceNow settings.
The Dynatrace URL and API token have been correctly entered in the environments table of ServiceNow.
The self-check has been run on the Support page in the ServiceGraph Connector for Dynatrace.
SG-DYNATRACE has been defined as a discovery source.
No errors have been logged in the system by the ServiceNow identification engine.
The identification log doesn't state anything about a customer-defined mandatory field that might be missing during the Dynatrace CMDB import.

Upgrading from a previous version of the integration application doesn't automatically delete the CIs from your CI table. If you want to start from scratch, you need to do it exclusively via a background script or filter CIs by Discovery Source: SG-DYNATRACE and delete it from the CI table manually. We don’t recommend that you do this in your ServiceNow PROD instance because historical incidents and events might be referencing it, and data would be lost.

Events don't show up in the ITOM events table

This can happen because of the following reasons.

The Send events into ServiceNow ITOM button hasn't been enabled in Dynatrace.
The user enabling the integration doesn't have the x_dynat_ruxit_integration role.

Application services and applications don't show up in the ServiceNow instance

Go to Service Graph Connector for Dynatrace > Settings and check if the synchronization of hosts, processes, services and applications is enabled.
In ServiceNow, enable Debug in Settings and check System Logs > Application logs and System Logs > Errors.

HTTP 403 Forbidden Access Restricted Not Authorized Error when sending a test notification

Add the following IP addresses and the ones listed in the error to your ServiceNow allow list.

52.26.178.159
52.0.97.215
54.154.238.149
52.74.69.201
54.66.240.72
54.147.40.70
3.231.89.157

For information about allowing specific IP addresses in ServiceNow, see Define IP Address access control.

Incidents aren't created correctly

Verify that the Dynatrace Incident Integration is correctly set up in Dynatrace.
Trigger a push from Dynatrace and check if the test entry is created under Dynatrace > Problems in ServiceNow.
If the problem is registered in the Problems import set table, but a corresponding incident entry isn't created, check for Problem to Incident Transformation Map and other errors.
Check for mandatory fields left empty during the transformation between problem entry and incident creation.

Incoming incidents aren't mapped to the affected server with CMDB

If there's no server with the same name, search for a server that has the Dynatrace Entity ID (for example, HOST-12121212) set within the CMDB CI attribute correlation_id.
Check if the Service Graph connector is downloaded, and the setup for CMDB Integration.
Check if the Dynatrace ID sync field in ServiceNow is correlation_id.

Problem link is broken in ServiceNow incident

Check within Dynatrace if the toggle Use text format for problem details instead of HTML was enabled.
If problem details are sent in plaintext format, you need to also change the ServiceNow table field from type HTML to type text.
Find the table x_dynat_ruxit_problems and change the type of the problem details field x_dynat_ruxit_problems.details from HTML to type string.

Frequently asked questions

Which Dynatrace IP addresses are allowed for ServiceNow integration?

For your Dynatrace instance to communicate with ServiceNow, you need to provide ServiceNow with a list of Dynatrace IP addresses that will be allowed to send information to ServiceNow. Dynatrace servers are distributed throughout various regions. The best way to ensure that you get the right IP addresses for your region is to look up the IP addresses by running the nslookup command. You must first create your environment in Dynatrace and then execute nslookup.

Example:

plaintext
C:\>nslookup abc.live.dynatrace.com

Optionally, you can review the OneAgent download page to see the IP addresses for your region.

Which ServiceNow tables are filled by the ServiceNow Dynatrace application?

Dynatrace sends all detected problems into the ServiceNow incident table (incident).
All single events that are correlated with a Dynatrace-detected problem are sent to the ITOM event table (em_event).
The relationship between a CI and a Dynatrace-detected problem is sent into the CIs Affected table (task_ci).
If enabled, Dynatrace synchronizes all auto-discovered web services into the CMDB application services table (cmdb_ci_services_discovered).
All hosts and process groups running on those hosts are synchronized into the CMDB server table and derived Linux and Windows server tables (cmdb_ci_server), and into the process groups related tables in ServiceNow (cmdb_ci_appl).

Which scheduled jobs pull the CMDB information from Dynatrace?

Dynatrace introduces one scheduled job that pulls a subset of the topology information from Dynatrace Smartscape at 10-minute intervals. The SG-Dynatrace scheduled job pulls all web application information along with their relation to software services, all host and process group information, and all software services and relationships. The information pull is performed using the official Dynatrace REST API.

How can I change the table or field where Dynatrace pushes the data?

Incidents are imported through an import set table (x_dynat_ruxit_problems). You can reconfigure the default transformation map Problem to Incident Transformation Map to route the information to different tables or fields.

How can I synchronize additional information or metrics?

The Dynatrace ServiceNow application is built entirely on the public Dynatrace API and uses a subset of this information by default. We recommend using the ServiceNow Dynatrace application as a starting point and customizing information retrieval based on your requirements. You can also fetch detailed near real-time metrics for each of your Dynatrace monitored configuration items using the Dynatrace API.

How can I automatically merge existing CIs with Dynatrace discovered CIs?

Deduplication is done through ServiceNow CMDB Identification and Reconciliation. Custom CI identification rules are used to merge identical CIs based on a given attribute (for example, host names).

Is there support for multiple environments in Dynatrace integration?

Multiple Dynatrace environments can be configured within the Dynatrace environments table in ServiceNow.