as more organizations adopt low code strategies and enable their citizen developers governance and insight to the apps is critical today's guest shares her thoughts on one of our capabilities to help with that welcome to breakpoint the servicenow developer podcast here's your host Chuck tomasi hello servicenow admins Builders developers and all of the Curious individuals that I say with the utmost love and respect welcome to or welcome back to breakpoint the servicenow developer podcast where we bring you the latest tools tips and tradecraft to accelerate your career in this episode I have the wonderful pleasure of talking with principal inbound product manager Brooks Hawkins how are you today Brooks I'm doing well thanks for having me Chuck super excited to be here well I'm super excited to have you as well now as per tradition we always like to get to know our new people you haven't been on breakpoint before I always like to get to know her yes tell us a little bit about yourself I I grew up in Houston Texas and moved to Chicagoland area in March of 2020 and I live with my fiance and our three dogs hopefully they're going to be quiet during this recording by joint servicenow in March of 2021 and before I joined service now I was working for an oil and gas company where I mostly worked in business intelligence but my most recent role there was implementing their citizen development program so bringing all that it admin knowledge managing a citizen development program here to service now Sally you're the right person for the right job I hope so so Brooks I understand you have an interesting path to servicenow I do uh so I got my undergrad degree at NYU in hotel management and after getting that degree and working a little bit in the hotel and tourism industry I decided it's not what I wanted to do and so I went back to school and got my Master's in computer science what was the prompt that went you know computer science looks much better than Hotel I mean I'm trying to try to make that connection in my mind uh so when I kind of realized that hotel management wasn't what I wanted to do my brother was a freshman in college trying to figure out what he wanted to do and my mom had him take the Johnson O'Connor Act 2 test and then I was like maybe I should jump in on that so I took that and they were the results were definitely not hotel management definitely more something along the lines of computer science engineering something like that all right Brooks given that interesting turn towards the more current what did you want to be when you grew up part of the reason I went into hotel management is because when I was younger we traveled a lot as a family um and I I'm a very detail-oriented person I started like noticing little things at hotels that are wrong or you know at airports things like that I was like oh I can travel and work in this industry not fully understanding as a young kid um how hard it is to work in that industry I'm the same way about the details there's two pepper shakers and no salt shakers on that table what's wrong who's responsible for this exactly and when you're not at work what do you enjoy doing uh so I'm a big sports fan it's especially baseball so right now middle base season I'm fan my fiance is a huge White Sox fan so we're doing a lot of watching baseball um trying not to get into arguments when they're playing each other uh and then we love take our three dogs to the forest preserves around our house and of course I'm a big foodie so loved to go into Chicago and try all the restaurants there it's a good food scene and I know all too well the trials and tribulations of a mixed family when it comes to sports yeah it's not always easy not gonna go there especially when they're playing each other yeah yeah exactly all right let's talk about what we came here to talk about today app engine management center let's start out for the listener what is it so abinger Management Center is a tool for it admins to manage all of their custom app development activities so everything from evaluating app ideas to actually deploying those apps to production and monitoring them in production well that sounds pretty straightforward now we we came out with that in San Diego if I remember right that is correct okay what new toys do we get in the Tokyo release so with Tokyo store one we have a new feature that we're calling app and developer visibility so now from production app engine admins can log into aemc or app engine Management Center and they will have visibility into all of their developers in development that have you that have either the AES user role or the delegated development role um and they'll also have visibility into all the custom apps that are being built in development and custom apps that have been actually published to production so no longer need to log into different instances to get that information we're going to bring it all to one place to give admins that full visibility Brooks was that one of those aha moments when you go we've already got the capabilities to communicate between instances we've been doing it for a long long time with update sets to know you know here's how we get the status of this app here and that app there yeah absolutely and it was one of those things I think coming into service now uh as a newer person that's not as familiar with how servicenow was configured that I was like well I don't want to keep vlogging as an itm and I don't want to keep logging into all these other instances to try to collect data to try to manage all these different requests I just want to go to one place and have it all at my fingertips and that's really what we're going for with AMC I as a person who's been using the platform for over 14 years I totally get that you just sort of fall into the habits and use what you're going to use and when somebody new comes along they say why are you doing it that way is there an easier way yeah you got to kind of get out of your comfort zone once in a while and so thank you very much Brooks for spotting opportunities like that and no problem now I understand we have configurable pipelines too yes we do can you explain what pipelines are and what it takes to set them up yeah absolutely so with the roam release we released the configurable pipelines so that allows customers to set up as many pipelines as they need with as many environments in each pipeline so the only thing that needs to be unique in a pipeline is the source environment or what we typically think of as a development instance okay but from there customers can build what makes sense for their company and their processes um and so they would actually configure the pipelines through the pipelines and deployments guided setup and once the admin sets up the pipeline the developers will be able to submit deployment requests from AES and those requests are going to be routed to production so again those app engine admins can just go to AMC and manage those requests directly in production and once they approve the app to go from development to say like a testing environment we're going to automatically run ATF Suites and an instant scan Suite and we'll attach those results to the deployment requests generate a new approval so the admin can actually review whether what are the results of all the tests that were run and then approve it again to go to say like a staging or production instance and those Suites are completely customizable as well uh admins can go in and add their own test cases and instant scan checks to be run against any of their custom apps where was this when I was a kid right yeah it's pretty cool oh man I mean you you set it up with guided setup you can trigger ATF you can do the instance scan you can see where it is from One console like oh please people if you're not using a EMC you should Brooks how are the flows and approvals configured in those in general how are pipelines configured so the pipelines are using flow designer and the CI CD spoke okay and the servicenow app repo so on our deployment requests we have an approval table and so we generate an approval after the app is installed on each instance in the pipeline and then once you approve it it goes to the next incense generates a new approval until you get to production so they could configure the approvals with conditionals to say I don't need an approval for you know say this particular app or something right right so they could um go in they could take a copy of our flows for the pipelines modify them on the what how they want to handle approvals and then we control which subflow runs okay for each environment type using a decision table so then they would just need to modify the decision table to point to their new flow and then that should work but we're hoping to make it even easier so they can configure those Dynamic approvals um when they're setting up the pipelines or during a deployment app engine management center is installable through the store correct that is correct okay I did do a little homework just before the podcast like yesterday I installed it I looked around I even made some corrections of the docs and app engine management center is included with an app engine license so this is not part of the standard platform this is value-add stuff that you pay for yes exactly and it's actually only included in the Standalone app engine licenses um so it's not included in the bundled app engine licenses okay so that's a specific distinction make sure that everyone knows how they can get their hands on AMC I'm gonna put a big caveat on that that's as of August 2022 September 2022 time frame pricing changes bundles change so if you're listening to this sometime in the future things may change as always standard disclaimer you'll get from me every time talk to your account team for more information on pricing and Licensing exactly I noticed a term in the documentation that said controller instance what is a controller instance so the controller instance is the instance that controls the pipeline so in order to get all the amazing features of pipelines Employments and app engine management center we recommend that the instance you use as a controller is your production instance and once the pipeline's actually set up this way all of your AES relay requests are going to be routed to production and all of your notifications are going to be sent from production so if someone is submitting a collaboration request or deployment request from development you still get to manage that in production and then you don't have the issues with notifications that it's blocked by say like a sub prod that doesn't send out notifications it's going to go from production and you can make sure the notifications actually go out to all the right people hence the reason you want it on production are there any considerations for cloning for cloning um app engine management center is highly dependent on pipeline's employment okay so that's how we get all the data from development into production so we have data preservers set up on certain pipeline tables to make sure those are not overridden um so the only part for cloning is that you want to make sure that say like the ATF property that you're going to use on testing to make sure those ATF test cases run is also set on production so when you clone it down you're not overwriting that property but for AMC it's really just make sure the pipelines is all set up correctly now I get to play my favorite sound effect the Safe Harbor collects in Safe Harbor Safe Harbor because this is the part of the show where I ask you can you give us a hint of what's on the road map I can definitely give you a little bit of a hint uh so in November with Tokyo sword 2 we are planning on bringing in app usage data so now that an app is in production you still have to monitor it and you want to know is it actually being used and who is actually using it so you'll be able to track all that in app engine management center for any of your custom apps and then in Utah we're targeting some features around enhancing our pipelines so things like integrating with cmdb and change management as well as allowing admins to schedule production deployments um and dynamic approvals so it's not always up to the app ad app engine admin to approve everything maybe they want someone in the line of business to approve something or they want to test her to approve it to go to the next stage in the pipeline and then we're targeting some features around data governance giving admins more control over what data certain developers can use when building their apps and giving them more visibility into the data that's actually used in an app you well then Brooks what words of advice do you have for new developers listening to all this wonderful information about app engine management center wishing I was one of them mostly the people using App engine management center are our admins who could also be developers but if you are a developer that's not an admin make sure you're working with your admins you know they want to help you they don't want to be bottleneck and we're hoping to give them more and more tools to help you get your apps built into production as quickly as possible wonderful stuff thank you for joining us today before we leave can you let the listener know how they can get in touch with you yeah they can find me on LinkedIn so Brooks Hawkins and that's Brooks with an S not brook or they can email me at brooks.hawkins at servicenow.com okay I'm curious to know is there a Brooke Hawkins that gets a lot of your requests no oh but uh usually when I say Brooks uh people just assume like they misheard uh so just want to make sure that that they know there's an s on there yeah there's probably a brook Hawkins who's a flight attendant for Southwest or something called who are these service now people well again thank you very much Brooks and thank you wonderful listener for joining us today don't forget to check out the other servicenow podcast we have plenty of them and I think they're popping up like mushrooms more every day you can find them all at community.servicenow.com under the resources menu or go to servicenow.com podcast subscribe to this or any of them for absolutely free to get them automatically delivered you won't miss an episode it's like a gift in your inbox every once in a while you just wow there's a new break point hooray I'm gonna go listen to it right now break point is brought to you by servicenow executive producer is me Chuck tomasi video and captions appear courtesy of Earl Duque to find out more about the servicenow developer program I invite you to head over to developer.servicenow.com once again thank you so much Brooks for all the wonderful information on aemc today thanks for having me Chuck please let us know what you think about this podcast you can leave feedback or ask questions in the servicenow community for more great information on servicenow development check out the servicenow developer portal at developer.servicenow.com thanks for listening okay then let me start out with something like this hello this is usually like when the Landscaping guy shows up who wants an extra treat if you shut up we won't mention any of that on the podcast how's that for an abstract before wow that's not even on there anyway uh oops I gotta stop being so anime I just knocked a counterweight on my mic boom wow that was just a big mental blank whoosh at least you know what you were talking about