as many longtime listeners know I've always been fascinated by Integrations it's a way to make one plus one equal 100 when it comes to driving value from our systems in this episode we'll find out what's new in our Tokyo release when it comes to integration hub welcome to breakpoint the servicenow developer podcast here's your host Chuck tomasi oh servicenow admins Builders developers and curious individuals and of course I always say that with the utmost love and respect welcome to breakpoint the servicenow developer podcast where we bring you the latest tools tips and tradecraft to accelerate your career in this episode I've got the pleasure of talking to staff product manager at servicenow Anders Henriksen how are you today Anders I'm very good thank you Chuck how are you doing I'm off to a good start it's a bright sunny morning where I am and I believe it's a cloudy overcast afternoon where you are normally it is but today we actually got some sunshine so I'll mark it in the calendar use Sunshine all right you and I have known each other at servicenows co-works for 12 years that's that's hard to believe but I realized I don't know that much about you personally other than you live somewhere across the Atlantic Ocean so please tell me and The Listener a little bit about yourself right so I'll try to make it quick then but originally from Sweden hence why I got this accent um nowadays I live in the UK um which has been my home for about 23 years so I'm quite old um I started working I started my working Life as a programmer moved into sort of Unix and system administration database Administration and those technical things worked with a few Telco software providers to implement billing systems across the globe and a lot of it is sort of technical things and that's I think we're talking about Integrations here right but all those years writing those scripts setting up those Crown jobs you have to understand you know helping my own work life to simplify it I guess right that's what got me started in Integrations I guess and before we hit record you and I were talking about the early days of both of us like 12 years ago at serviced now doing discovery implementations that that Unix experience understanding ports and protocols and that's not what we're here to talk about but I thought that'd be a good freebie to throw into the listener you never know what your experience will sum up to be for your next position or a future position so keep that in mind that variety is really good especially those personal projects that we talked about with Jake a few months ago so all right I'm totally off track this is about you I I agree right it's um whatever you have in the background and whatever you tell them at the job interview I guess right that that they will put you in a place there and for me it was actually the opposite I knew the protocols and the discovery part I just didn't know much about incidence problem change I guess right so we came from different background stuff I guess so that's good a lot of fun and when you're not at work what do you enjoy doing for fun uh usually I disconnect from all my technical devices go Outdoors put it on a pair of hiking shoes and go camping in the forest or paddling down the river or something like that right that's Outdoors is the place for me nice I wish I could do that even when I'm unplugged my watch still vibrates and goes no stop I don't need to keep up with this Facebook conversation right now speaking of watch buzzing for our fun question what is your favorite item you bought this year yeah I used to say that um I spent my way through the pandemic I guess right I seem to have bought a lot of things for the last couple of years uh this year I think it's uh my kamado barbecue you know the big ceramic barbecues and they're probably they're probably been around for years over where you are but they're amazing I bought one of those and I'm trying to cook as much as possible hence the Outdoor Living outdoor cooking nice good combination you enjoy it use it a lot yeah I do actually when it's not raining you know I'm in the UK so yeah we're not sponsoring anyone else's products in case anyone is wondering I'm not putting any affiliate links in the show notes so never mind if if you want to go talk to Anders we'll give you his links later all right before we get into our main topic I wanted to call back to Michael's episode number 62 that we released on September 23rd about automation engine and the stack in there so this fits in really well with that because integration Hub is part of the automation engine uh stack so let's talk about integration hub for the new listeners I always like to start here long time listeners will know this that way when somebody's new we don't go hey let's talk about integration hope and they go what is it I want to Define what it is from the beginning from the subject matter expert that'd be you excellent right so um when we first joined the church there was orchestration I think what's the what's the place to go for anything Automation and um you know we've been there we we used them we we love them back then right but they usually turn quite quickly into some kind of scripting uh most of the time I guess right um although it was a good way to sort of automate things back then but there needed to be a better way a simpler way maybe to set up these Integrations and um flow designer which is the place where you're using integration apps a flow designer allows you to build this process of logical steps and it will trigger by state changes on records or whatever in servicenow platform or if a user orders something from the catalog or an email comes in or external API calls whatever there's many ways to trigger these flows um and that's where integration have Cuts in so in this flow you can then reach out to other systems they might be go and gather some information from bigfix or check the latest status in jira or send notifications to themes of slack or deploy virtual machines in the cloud there's so many things we can do of course right and I think when you spoke to Michael um you were talking about the number of spokes which is 175 plus and spokes are available on the store so that's a big array of spokes to use in your flows and if there isn't one there you can obviously build your own reusable components in an action and a spoken and share them on the on the platform in their environment I'm going to back up real quick again for the new listeners spoke is a collection of actions generally based around a particular technology so when you said jira spoke there's you know go get my projects and update this those are the actions that are collected into a jira Spoke there's Google sheet spoke there's uh spokes all over the place you have 175 of these collections that you can get from the store so just clarifying in case anybody missed the memo I don't want to don't want to assume everybody knows everything at this point okay now that we've got the basics out of the way what's new in Tokyo because I I perceived this as more of a maintenance release than than having a big shiny object unless I miss something so please clue me in now you're right Chuck we've we've been able to go and focus on some not the big shiny things as you say right but sort of some really really useful things in Tokyo as well then so um the first one I want to bring up is connection over right and let's see if I can set the scene for this one so as you build Integrations on the servicenow platform you you might build a an action that goes out and collects data from a system within your environment but you might have multiple systems across the world so you have one in in America you have one in Europe you have one in Australia maybe and these these environments they're the same message from an integration so I just want to connect to them and bring data back so when you set up your data integration you would connect to this environment and now you want to connect to the other two so in the past you would have to either script that to sort of change that connection or you would have to build a whole new integration again right you would have to set up the data source connection you would have to build your mapping and you can have to schedule it as well but so in Tokyo with the connection override it means that I'm gonna schedule my import I can override that message so can you set up a new schedule then say this time when I when you run this schedule connect to this environment instead and that bring the data back from that system so it simplifies the maintenance simplifies the setup um of data Imports then from from multiple environments and the scalability as well so I hadn't thought about it on a global capacity like you said you might have a connection in Australia and you might have a different Connection in a Maya that that would be frightening to think about prior to Tokyo having connection overrides uh so I can I can certainly see how some customers would get a big benefit out of that yeah okay that's one I suspect you have more I have more so integration Hub Imports so hopefully most uh listeners have have used the new feature of integration of import it came out in Rome um and this is a simple way of importing data to um the platform so it's sort of a three-step approach you set up your source which is a data stream of set or Excel spreadsheet you configure your mapping drag and drop and drag the pills over to where you want them and you then the third step is to either run it or set up the schedule for it so it's sort of a simplified way um of running Imports um and the it's been around since Rome as I said so the Tokyo new thing the new thing in Tokyo is that we can now detect changes then so sometimes you know these Excel spreadsheets they would change some sometimes they change yeah yeah I think it's more than something um a lot of the time they change so and or even even data streams right so you might improve or sort of add things on to your data stream actions did it bring out different or more data usually um to your integration so now we can detect that we'll give the users sort of a heads up to say these have changed and you know you might want to go and check your mapping if there's more Fields you want to add to this as well so um it's a nice feature um and it just helps the Integrations to to stay up to date I love integration Hub important I wish it was around when we started you know 12 14 years ago doing these Imports it just simplifies the whole data source import set transform map field mappings uh it's it's not as robust I will say that you don't have things like the on after on start scripts but for the target audience that's importing a spreadsheet that's going to do it most of the time it's just so much easier the other thing I discovered quite by accident When I Was preparing for knowledge 22 was that the uh the fields for the source and the target are now alphabetized I was putting together a demo for Creator con and I was importing the spreadsheet I went wow their their Alpha advertise and you might not think something like this is important until you reach a lot of people that are new to the platform you know I can scan through there and go find name you know it's the fourth one over here and it's the sixth one over there somebody mentioned this when I was writing my own ticketing system a couple decades ago and and I had uh like the field status type on there and and she said hey can you make those alphabetized like you know Grumble Grumble I did it and a whole bunch of people went oh thank you I didn't even know yeah so things as a developer that you might miss you probably want to get some user acceptance testing on those so just having the alphabetized field it may not seem like a lot but it is to a lot of people I think I think you're right sugar and it's a small thing that makes a big difference as you said right and uh you might not notice it or you might not care so much if it's less than 20 fields in your target um but as soon as you have to scroll up and down it becomes pretty tricky so um I'm glad we fixed that and we've got more improvements in that area I mean that's what else do you have in your bag of tricks for integration hub for Tokyo yeah so so now the little thing since we are already have import side of things so you know how you can use reference fields and so you have a table and you have a reference field and you up until Tokyo you had to put in the display value sure this so that was that was pretty easy if you know the display value but if you have another value you couldn't sort of reference another field in there so we've made that available as well sort of you can now select the exact field in that reference table that you want to use for matching with so small things like that we managed to fit in there so that's witchcraft normally you know let's say I get a spreadsheet from one department and it's got a whole bunch of Department codes in it and I've got codes and names in my cmn department table in servicenow normally people reference that as you know 4400 Dash you know sales well if it's not that way in the spreadsheet all they have is 4 400. you can map that now to say I can either use The 4400 part or I can use the sales or I can use the whole thing absolutely that's awesome I love it wow again where was this when I was a child [Laughter] should we go for one more here right so um yes it's a little bit more technical um but um it's about Dynamic effort so Dynamic output is a feature on our data stream actions then right so um so imagine you call a third-party system for an we call it an object uh you say give me this object but depending on the parameters you send to this third-party system you might get a different structure back so if I call this system with a input parameter of user or if I call it with an input parameter or building I might get different structure back and that would change my output from my action so sure so again that is something we now we support in them in the integration app Imports if you have a data stream action with Dynamic outputs you cannot use Ms balance so um that's that's a nice little feature we've added in this is one of those things that we've had in integration hub where you're creating your own actions and whatnot you could have Dynamic inputs Dynamic outputs so now it's available in integration Hub import easy version right that's right that's right oh wow okay now again I have to explain Dynamic outputs you explained it very well the value of that isn't recognizable until you need it as soon as you see the light go on like wait if I just specify a different table to my CRM or to my other ticketing system I can get back a dynamic object that I can wow your mind just goes boom it's it's spectacular when that stuff works because it makes the user experience so much easier to do what you need to do when you have Dynamic data and it all happens magically behind the scenes okay we've looked at what's new in Tokyo now my favorite question for all product managers because you do have the word product manager in your title what's on the road map for the future Safe Harbor Safe Harbor right so the next release must be Utah right um so we are focusing on further improvements to the data mapping sites integration have import again if I use the word Auto mapping you might get excited as well Chuck you mean like that related link on the transform episode like try your best to match the fields absolutely it's coming back right make it simple so although drag and drop is um is not hard but if you have to do 20 of them every time you said re mapping you know if you can set up click on auto mapping that's something coming back um and also you were talking about the alphabetic side of of the target Fields we're now making the fields you can select What fields you want in there right so you can select all fields or five fields or whatever I need for my integration and just those ones so you don't have to scroll up and down anymore so simplifying the whole setup of the integration what else what else the other the other topic and this is a bigger topic and we might have another podcast on this track in the future but it's about event streaming that sounds like a pay-per-view thing where you want to watch the boxing match that's not that's not event streaming not this one and also some people think it's sort of the event management side of events coming in but it's not that either an application in this page would be Apache Kafka so that's an open source um application you can put events in there so that's basically messages okay into a queue and it goes down the stream and other systems can sort of subscribe to that and listen in and post things on this um these cues then right so um and what's what's so good about this is that you can then turn on and I'll sort of go in and start listening as into a service that I could listen into to this or post messages as well so let me get this right this is like an Enterprise messaging bus sort of like other systems can listen in analogous to when you put an event into the service now event queue with maybe a system called like gst.event queue incident.updated and and someone out there a script action or a notification or something says hey I'm going to react to that well that's just within the platform but Kafka what do we do we have a product name for this yet yes we call it stream connect we're actually moving away from the event the stream connect is the name good okay so stream connect you can put something out there and maybe your CRM maybe your Erp maybe something else goes I want that I can react to that new customer has been added or sales order has been put in or something of that nature is that what we're talking about absolutely and this this this system they're really good at handling a large amount of messages so imagine a bank financial institution maybe a lot of transactions being generated um servicenow might be tracking the sort of the life cycle of this transaction um and you know verify the status of it so the benefit of of having this stream connect in between areas that we can handle a lot of messages coming in we're not sort of relying on rest and sort of the number of transactions coming in so we might have up to two three thousand messages a second coming in and these systems can easily handle that that's not the problem for them but that gives us that buffer and then we can start going through the the events and messages in our in our own time would something like this be used for the itom world where they have event management and it just keeps firing all these things at us yeah no definitely there'd be uh the item will be in there as a candidate for this um I think uh the other way would be sending servicenow logs out as well to okay so you kind of answered my next question we can I have to learn the terminology of stream connect we can be a producer as well as a consumer subscriber to some filtered version of the events and say hey I only want the ones for service I'm looking I'm already getting excited about a demo for this at least six months away a lot of customers asking for just that sort of even the state like the state changes on the task yeah in the service now he has to post Those ads so other systems can react to If it's been closed or reopened or whatever it could be I guess right so even those simple things I guess are there but also the big volume as I've been talking about as well so so customers might already have these environments set up so they only got integration set up between their internal systems and now linking servicenow into that it means that as you said we can listen to those events and perform an Automation in service now or we can sort of feed data back as well to enhance those events as well so Anders thank you so much for joining us today before we leave can you let the listener how to get in touch with you yes absolutely yeah you can contact me through my email andrews.hendrickson at servicenow.com or LinkedIn of course Anderson there as well and I will have links to both of those in the show notes and on the blog posts and all the usual places in case you're wondering I still can't spell his last name even when I'm looking at it for listener for joining us today don't forget yet check out the other servicenow podcast you can find them all at servicenow.com Community under the events menu it has changed since we did the upgrade in October 2022 so subscribe to it or any of them for free so you get them all automatically delivered to you never miss another episode ever ever on any topic you get them all I do breakpoint is brought to you by servicenow executive producer chuck tomasi oh that's me video and captions by Earl Duque thank you very much and to find out more about the servicenow developer program head over to developer.servicenow.com but yet thank you so much Anders for sharing with us today thanks my pleasure please let us know what you think about this podcast and leave feedback feedback for more great information on servicenow development check out the servicenow developer portal at developer.servicenow.com thanks for listening I'm not sure if this tea is working this morning no I don't need caffeine you don't want to see Chuck on caffeine you know what a Jack Russell Terrier is now since you have the word product manager no yeah you do have the word product manager let's try that again we do over subscribe a bit to the term event don't we we should come up with something else maybe and thank you wonderful listener for joining us today don't forget to check out the other servicenow podcast you can find them all at servers now wow that was awful so let me start that part over again thank you so much underscore underscore name underscore underscore for sure and we'll call that a recording of some type I like it I like it we don't know what happens after this editing