ServiceNow Source Connector for Confluent Platform¶

The Kafka Connect ServiceNow Source Connector is used to move creations and updates in ServiceNow Table to Apache Kafka® in real-time. Data is consumed from the ServiceNow table to Kafka topics in a timely manner using range queries against the ServiceNow Table API.

Features¶

The ServiceNow Source Connector offers the following features:

Exactly-Once Semantics: The connector delivers messages only once under normal operation. The connector produces once for each real time updates from ServiceNow Table. However, duplicates are still possible to occur when failure, rescheduling or re-configuration happens.
Automatic Retries: The ServiceNow connector may experience network failures connecting to the ServiceNow endpoint. The connector will automatically retry to poll from the endpoint. The property retry.max.times controls how many times retries will be attempted. An exponential backoff will be added to each retry interval.
Supports HTTPS Proxy: The connector can connect to ServiceNow using an HTTPS proxy server.
Elasticity: The connector allows user to configure two parameters to enforce throughput limit: batch.max.rows and poll.interval.s. The connector uses 10000 records and 20s interval as a default. If a large number of updates occur within the given interval, the connector will paginate records according to configurable batch size. Note that since ServiceNow provides precision down to 1 second, the ServiceNow Connector provides lowest poll.interval.s to be the same.
Real-time and Historical Lookup: The connector supports a specific starting point in the history. It is capable of retrieving all historical records in one run and catching up with real-time records.

Prerequisites¶

The following are required to run the Kafka Connect ServiceNow Source Connector:

Kafka Broker: Confluent Platform 3.3.0 or above, or Kafka 0.11.0 or above
Connect: Confluent Platform 4.1.0 or above, or Kafka 1.1.0 or above
ServiceNow API: New York, Madrid or London.

Quick Start¶

The quick start guide uses ServiceNow source connector to consume records from a ServiceNow Table and send them to Kafka. This guide assumes multi-tenant environment is used. For local testing, please refer to Running Connect in standalone mode.

Install the connector through the Confluent Hub Client.

# run from your confluent platform installation directory
confluent-hub install confluentinc/kafka-connect-servicenow:latest

Start the Confluent Platform.

Tip

The command syntax for the Confluent CLI development commands changed in 5.3.0. These commands have been moved to confluent local. For example, the syntax for confluent start is now confluent local start. For more information, see confluent local.
```
confluent local start
```
Check the status of all services.
```
confluent local status
```

Create a servicenow-source.json file with the following contents:

// subsitute <> with your config
{
    "name": "ServiceNowSourceConnector",
    "config": {
        "connector.class": "io.confluent.connect.servicenow.ServiceNowSourceConnector",
        "kafka.topic": "topic-servicenow",
        "servicenow.url": "https://<endpoint>.service-now.com/",
        "tasks.max": "1",
        "servicenow.table": "<table_name>",
        "servicenow.user": "<username>",
        "servicenow.password": "<password>",
        "servicenow.since": "2019-01-01",
        "key.converter": "org.apache.kafka.connect.json.JsonConverter",
        "value.converter": "org.apache.kafka.connect.json.JsonConverter",
        "confluent.topic.bootstrap.servers": "<server hostname>:9092",
        "confluent.license": "<license>", // leave it empty for evaluation license
        "poll.interval.s": "10",
        "confluent.topic.replication.factor": "1"
    }
}

Load the ServiceNow Source Connector by posting configuration to Connect REST server.

Caution

You must include a double dash (--) between the topic name and your flag. For more information, see this post.
```
confluent local load servicenow -- -d servicenow-source.json
```

Confirm that the connector is in a RUNNING state.

confluent local status ServiceNowSourceConnector

Create one record to ServiceNow.

curl -X POST \
    https://<endpoint>.service-now.com/api/now/table/<table_name> \
    -H 'Accept: application/json' \
    -H 'Authorization: Basic <token>'
    -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
    -H 'cache-control: no-cache' \
    -d '{"short_description": "This is test"}'

Confirm the messages were delivered to the topic-servicenow topic in Kafka.
```
confluent local consume topic-servicenow --from-beginning
```

Additional Documentation¶

Configuration Properties