[Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] hey welcome to Creator toolbox this is a show brought to you by the servicenow developer program where we demo new servicenow features for everyday every developer's toolbox that's why we call it Creator toolbox we are in the middle of our Utah release so uh pranav if you could point to your shoulder if you see that little logo the other side there no no the other shoulder um there you go that one uh if you if you see that logo on the top right that means we are in the Utah content release so it's just an easy way for us to identify quickly for you all what kind of content we're giving you for this if you want to see all the different things that we've been doing in Utah go ahead and go to devlink.sn Utah and you'll see all the cool stuff that we've been doing for Vlogs live streams podcasts all centered around the Utah release of servicenow but before we jump into content today let's do some introductions and I'll have pranav introduce himself hey everyone my name is pranab and I'm a senior developer advocate here at servicenow and I'm gonna pass it to Earl hi everyone I am also developer advocate here at servicenow I've been with the company for about two years and before that I was in higher ed doing a lot of uh servicenow development and Senior engineering and all that kind of stuff and without further Ado I would like to kick it off to Our Guest today who will be leading us through the content Arctic thank you all thank you pranav I hope you guys can see my screen there we go awesome now let's start with a very small story that I have so back in 2021 I was talking to Mike who was the leading RPA Coe in an organization now Mike's job was to make sure to drive the RPA practice within the organization and automate various business processes with all the tools at his disposal now Mike having said that Mike had his share of problems at it so one of the things that Mike was having problem was to evangelize automations within the organization now everybody faces those problems so that everybody in the organization knows that hey there are there's an automation team and we need to provide them use cases so that they can build automations now getting these use cases are very inorganic in nature so the teams have to go out and ask other teams to find out hey do you have a use case for us to solve now once they start getting with all the troubles getting in all the use cases it becomes difficult for them to go ahead and then prioritize all these use cases as well now this is 2021 that I'm talking about and back in 2020 everybody knows what hit all of us suddenly right so we we were hit by coed and during this covet period there was a lot of you and cry about automation at that point of time as well and organizations went ahead for shopping and bought a ton of our automation tools they got multiple RPA tools they've got multiple I-Pass tools and now it became even more difficult for Mike to identify what automation should be performed on what kind of tool and also at the same time while I was discussing with my heat informed that hey I have various different tools they are functioning in in certain manner but I don't have a single view to manage them as well now all of these problems were were there for Mike and it was juggling to balance between the tools that is disposal often messing up the balance between his work and life as well of course we don't want that to happen now in comes automation Center and that's your management automation management tool for people like Mike to successfully manage their automation practice my name is Karthik Lanka and I'm the senior principal product manager for automation Center and RPA Hub as well and I will be taking you through the capabilities of automation Center that have been released in the utilities let's go further now what is automation Center in the first place let's do a quick recap as to what the whole idea of automation Center was now automation Center helps you automate and connect anything that is there in servicenow now with servicenow's automation Center you can integrate with RPA Hub now RPA Hub is primarily used in places where you have your underlying Target applications do not provide API Integrations then we went ahead and integrated automation center with integration Hub this is a very subtle difference between RPA Urban integration Hub in integration Hub your target applications provide you with API Integrations now this opens up the gamut of Target applications for you you can have applications with apis without apis irrespective you can go and connect with third-party applications with tools coming out of the service now stable in our roadmap as well we have plans to integrate with Doc Intel or document intelligence now this product gives you the capability ease of extracting semi-structured data from documents itself and provide you a very structured format so that you can go ahead and consume it going further now apart from integrating with all the products coming out of the service now stable automation Center also provides the capability of integrating with third-party tools as well remember Mike had this problem of managing various different Tools in various different dashboards and not having a single view to manage his automation so that's the problem that automation Center went ahead and solved for them where you can now have multiple different RPA tools multiple different iPass tools talking to servicenows automation Center and showing up data there so that you can take corrective measures or to govern them and manage all of them at the same time now let us quickly look at what we delivered in version one a very quick recap of what we we delivered there now in version one the platform provided dashboards to give you overview of what all was happening with your automations with the robots and other running assets from all various vendors also at the same time with all the various vendors data coming in we could also showcase execution details to all the to all the automation series and then they can go ahead and take instant action if there's some executions that are failing this also gives you information and insights about which tools performance is better and they can provide more Investments towards those tools as well now when I say insights we also provide very actionable cards to you in version one itself where you can go ahead and take actions and corrective actions to make sure your practice is running smoothly now how are we getting these third party data into the servicenow instance we provided you with generic ETL capabilities where you can now bring in third party Erp data in a very simple Json format and then push all the data into the servicenow instance and then once the data shows up in the instance the dashboards get populated on their own last but not the least the most important feature that we had was goals and requests remember Mike had this inorganic problem of reaching out to teams within the company to get use cases out of them now we solved that problem by providing the capability to everybody within an organization to go ahead and raise our automation request from their own system which organically trickles down to the automation Coe team and then you can look at the request you can prioritize the request and then you can take action on it as to which tool is the best tool to go ahead and perform the automation for this no there's a lot of cool capabilities that we delivered in version one but we went ahead and increased the coolness quotient by a notch in version 2 as well now in version two and trust me this is the last last slide that I have and then we jump onto the demos now in version two we came up with five different capabilities that were there now in version one we only were focusing on RPA in version two now we focus on iPads our integration Hub capabilities as well now you can pick and choose which flows do you want to show up in automation Center and you can you want to manage them also at the same time we went ahead with a real time integration with uipath as a third party vendor for RPA now we we can now get data from the robots from their processes from their executions with respect to all the current operations that that's happening on uipath and instantaneously in real time that information trickles into a automation Center and data populates on your screens then we got in a very interesting feature called spotlight now you have all these requests coming in and you would want to prioritize these requests based on certain criteria maybe the importance of how much people are working in that particular team or how much value or how much cost is been consumed for each execution so various different criterias that are there based on these criteria the system will automatically generate a spotlight score the higher the score the higher value that you are going to drive by delivering automation to that kind of process so we have gotten that Spotlight feature in for automation Center 2.0 also at the same time we got in the recommendation actions now as and when imagine you being a user and you go ahead and submit an automation request from your site the automation team Mike's team will look at your request and suddenly there's a pop-up that comes up by saying hey there are these additional or already automated use cases that are there which are very similar to the ask that you're currently reviewing that gives your recommendation buzzing hey there's already something there why don't you go and play with the existing automations reduce the amount of time that you spend on this current request and automate the process faster it's a faster type value and faster time to Market as well and finally we came up with the value dashboard an additional dashboard from our site which showcases the business value of customer of your automations to your Senior Management and they can additionally go ahead and pump in additional Investments so that the whole automation practice grows organically so that's a lot of features that we are going to look at today these are five different features that you're going to look at today so let's just take a very quick breather soak in the features that are there in front of you and we'll head into the demo from here onwards thanks that's a lot of stuff of course now I'll just go ahead and open my service my servicenow instance just give me one second I'm always excited for anything automation Center just because it seems to change dramatically every anything automation engine it's every things change so rapidly now it's so fun to watch especially since uh ever since you appeared on the show last year one almost one year ago since April so it's cool to see all the changes since then too and uh thanks to you all the best part about that previous show was there's a lot of interest that got generated because of that show and a lot of good has happened suppose that so I'll go ahead and click on the workspace for automation Center this is what you see uh on the screen right now so these are the dashboards that are there and we'll talk about where is all these information from these dashboards that are coming in so let me just go back to the PPT and just click one second so I'll keep it like this right so the first one that we're going to look at is tracking flows within automations so for that what we'll do is we'll first go and try to create a record within the system where I'm going to decide which flow do I want to be a part of the automation Center tracking system for that what I'll go do is I'll go to automation well go ahead and open this record thank you for naming it something obvious yeah so we had a bunch of other names also up our mind but I think tracker was the one that the team said it makes sense so in the tracker system you can go and create a new record here and then in the model that you see on the screen you will have an option to sell it which published flows do you want to go ahead and track within your system but before I go ahead and do that I'll open another record from my site to Showcase that hey things actually work in a very interesting way so for that I'll go and open Flow automations so now flow automations is your primary table where you would need to have all servicenow flows to be a part of in case you want to go ahead and track them now this is a CI table and we leverage the 3mdbci capabilities from this particular table and all your flows will come and show up here now this particular table rolls up and extends to another table which is cmdbca automation CI cmdb automation CA and automation CA has two or I'll say three different classes one is flow automation the second one is bot process the third one is robots so this is one of the classes that we're looking at right now now you see that there are already three flows that have been marked registered here in flow automations now we are going to we want to go and add a new one now since it's a CI record I cannot associate a flow directly towards here record so I will have to associate it via an intermediary table so I use an automation tracker record here so I'll go ahead and add a flow called Docker subflow and go ahead and submit this now as soon as I do that I should be seeing that flow here slow here let me just look around yep there you go Docker web hook subflow it comes and shows up here in the automation tracker now let's go ahead and refresh this little boy and see what particular connection if you can click hide on that little press the high button yeah perfect there you go thank you thank you very much so now you have the docker web subflow here as well now with this available here all the executions for this particular flow will be go on will go ahead and track get tracked within the automation Center system and where do they get tracked they get tracked in automation execution summary so we have two tables summary and import as open both of them so there is a specific schedule which is a 24 hour schedule for any servicenow based records to get captured in automation execution summaries so after every 24 hours all of the executions will get accumulated with respect with respect to specific logic and will show up in the execution summaries table now we show all the widgets and all the graphs that are there within automation Center based on this very specific table itself so if you go back to automation Center and you go into it you go and look into what all is there so you can see that all or servicenow flows will show up in this particular graph which is coming out of automation execution summary itself also at the same time while I opened another record for ourselves which is called automation execution inputs now this is an intermediatory table for all third parties tools for example blue prism uipath or any other source that you have you can push data in all the data into this this table and again after every 24 hours based on specific rules and accumulation of data this data goes and gets filled into execution summary table as well so that's how these two primary tables work within service now now as I said once you have your flows in place you you can see your flows information on these graphs here and you can see execution of flows in the execution summary table execution tab as well now going forward let's look at what is the other capability that we have we have web hooks integration with UI path now this is a very interesting capability that we got in this time previously we used to use endpoint apis which are which we opened up within servicenow so that customers can go and use a specific Json format to go and start pushing data into execution Imports table now that's not a real-time information that's coming in so we went ahead and created a web hook capability for uipath but for that first the customer would need to go into plugins and install the UI path spoke let us go into plugins we sometimes this plugins page takes time I know right when you clicked on plugins live I was like oh we're playing a risky okay I like it [Music] there you go so you can say UI path you have this book there so it I have already installed it on my system but you can go ahead and install this particular spoke on your system now once you have installed uipath within your system Navigator you can you will see two specific recalls you'll see let's go ahead and click your path you will see UI path Web book Registries and you'll see uipath Web book routing policies so first we need to go and register a web hook between a servicenow instance and UI path as well so meanwhile just give me a second if I can get you a image of your pathology or this just give me one second we do have a question so um yes we do have a question so you're showing automation trackers earlier and adding it to automation Center uh we had a question that are you able to add something into automation Center or set it to be tracked from flow designer or is it always through automation Center so these are all the flows that are there within service now so maybe I go can you repeat the question again or maybe you can are you able to set a automation tracker via when you're in flow designer or do you do it always through that table and how you you always do that you always do that through this table itself okay so you have Separate Tables for flow designer these are tables which are scoped which are scoped within automation Center scope the scope of this particular tracker is automation Center all right just give me one second I'll just pull up pull this up as well and keep this handy and then we'll go to the instance from our side automation there you go so in UI path we go you we went ahead and opened up uipath webhook Registries and we can go and click on new here to create a new registry between servicenow instance and uipath I can go and give a name here I'll say create a toolbox demo and I can go and save this right now as soon as I save this I get a UI action on top which says generate callback URL in secret I'll just go and click on this and I will get a callback URL for myself from my said and go go and get a secret here now I have an image of uipath I cannot show the actual instance to you so within uipath when you go into a tenant and click on the webhooks option and you want to create a new web hook you can give it a name give the URL the same URL that we got here the Callback URL and give the secret here the same secret we got here and that should do the trick for you now additionally there are there is an option called select individual events as of now we support processes robots and jobs out of service out of uipath we are not supporting queues as of now but that's on the roadmap so you would want to go ahead and click on the second option and select those three assets only right so that's how you can go and set up a web hook between uipath and service now and then as we were discussing you would want to go and take a quick look at these routing policies as well now these routing policy is basically tell us that once a date some data comes into the system what is the next action that you would want to take so from automation Center we ship all of these routing policies from our side and mark them as active true okay I'll just open up one such policy now this is a robot policy any crud operation on the robot that has happened with respect to modification with respect to Creation or with respect to deletion this particular record will get triggered and from here it will go and launch a subflow from here so you have flow inputs and you can go and it goes ahead and launch a subscribe from there so let me open up another one for you for the processor so this will go ahead and Trigger your subflows from here and sort and basically what we'll do is it will map the fields that are coming in from uipath map the fields to servicenow automation tracker tracker table and go ahead and push all the data into the automation tracker table sorry my mistake not the tracker table automation executions import table it will go ahead and push all the data into the executions import table so that's what uipath's integration is what we have done from our site and then we went ahead and did Integrations with spotlight now for spotlight uh just give me a second let's get back to the instance so for spotlight again we need to download a plugin from our side now let's see where the plugins are yep so we need to go ahead and download a plugin from our so that's a spot right and this is the first plugin this is a performance analytics Spotlight plugin it's a paid plugin but you can try it on on your PDFs if you have and you can go and install it and start working on the spotlight itself now how does this particular chap works so once you go ahead and install it on the system you can go ahead and first go to automation Center properties and enable Spotlight from your site automation Center properties here and just open the properties and the first property says this property value determines whether the system would use Spotlight scope for determining automation request rank it comes as default no but you can go ahead and Mark it as yes and it is and you can use Spotlight feature within your system itself how does that Spotlight feature basically go ahead and work we can go ahead and open up something called as Spotlight groups we go and open spotlight groups you will see that there's a group for automation request let me go ahead and open this particular group within this request within this particular group that we have we have a spotlight request for various different criteria that is there for example if I say the actual cost per run is high which basically means if it's more than 5000 then give it a weightage of 500 if it is low or if it is between 1 and 2500 give it a weightage of 30. similarly if the manual steps are high give it a weightage of 100 if the priority is critical give it a weightage of 1500 this is all with respect to your automation request form all these fields are there in your automation request form depends on what data you're entering in that field the weightage is added upon and eventually it shows up in the spotlight score for you you can go and modify these weightages from your side you can just directly open any of these criterias and then go ahead and modify the weightage or the criteria itself if you want also at the same time if you want to disable the criteria you can just go ahead and Mark this weight as zero anything that has been shipped from our side if you go and Mark it as zero you can disable it you also have the delete button but I would not recommend you to go ahead and delete any criteria that are there otherwise it becomes difficult to manage later on so once you have gone ahead and created a spotlight for yourself I will just go to an automation request from my side and show you how it shows up let's say automation all automation requests I'll open up the very first automation request from my site now there is a bunch of information that is already there in this particular request if I go down it will say the score is 1200. that's an interesting score now if I go ahead and change this value from my site from priority 4 to say hi criticality just go ahead and save it let's see if the score changes so the score has not changed but technically this code should go ahead and change it's implant States let's move it I promise interesting sometimes my own my own systems don't work for me but but in reality this course change based on what the priority of what you have changed within the system itself and then based on that score you can take you can determine as to whether you would want to go ahead and automate that particular process or not now you can see information with respect to score in your overview dashboard as well you can just go ahead and sort it by score and say this gives a very easy view to your automation Coes to go ahead and identify which is the first process that you would want to go ahead and automate from your site so that's the spotlight capability of the platform where you can see the scores and you can determine and prioritize your automation intake now next capability that we have is the recommended actions now for recommended actions as well you will have to go ahead into plugins and download a very specific plugin let's go to the plugin section okay recommended I like I mean one thing I'm noticing is that everything that you're showing us is attached to a plugin so all this stuff is as you need as or as you want sort of being feeling like you have to configure all these things at once but no it's actually the things that you need is what you can pull in at a time absolutely well and a lot of these capabilities like Spotlight and recommended actions all of these are platform capabilities that we are leveraging which gives which actually is the power of service now so as and when depending upon your need that you mentioned then you can go ahead and install those plugins for yourself all right so let's go and look at what recommendation actions can do for you so once the plugin is in place let's let me go back and see how I can go ahead and set up a recommendation I'll go to something called a similarity Solutions and here I have provided similarity capabilities for automation requests and automation attributes table now within automation Center we use two kinds of capabilities to uh to provide recommendations to our customers one is a string match where for automation request records we do a string match with process name process description and applications used and for automation attributes we use automation name automation description and Source name as well so mind you there needs to be at least a minimum of 10 records in each of these tables that you would want to run the ml model for so once there are at least 10 records for one time and only one time only for the first time you would have to go and click on this big button on the top right corner called update and retrain now once you go and update and retrain only for once periodically as and when more requests and more data gets into the system it automatically updates and retrains itself but to go ahead and use the recommendation actions capability on service now again you have to go to Assist quick little system property and enable it from your site so yes properties is I'll just quickly go to automation Center and you have this particular recommended action that is this this system property that is there which is marked value as true this is true for now but by default we send we push it across by false you can go ahead and Mark it as true install the plugin set up a similarity for yourself and then you can use recommendation actions within your system itself and finally we have the value dashboard capability now coming back to the service now instance in the V1 version we only had overview and execution tabs now we have the value tab as well now every request that you raise can be Associated to specific goal now imagine you are a VP within your organization and your senior VP has provided you a goal by saying hey for the finance organization I would want to reduce the amount of money that I'm pushing in by 10 or maybe they say be very brutal about it and say I want to reduce maybe around 10 percent of Workforce within my organization position that's the goal that somebody can have now in order to achieve those goals people would have to go ahead and create automations create requests by saying hey for to reduce 10 percent capacity in my finance department maybe in an in an AP process accounts payable process I would want to automate this process so that I reduce the number of people working in that process which is in line with my goal I raise a request which is associated to the goal and I can go ahead and then perform automations on it so this value dashboard goes ahead and shows you information pertaining to your goals which says that there are three pending goals which are three pending requests which is which has got an expected cost saving in dollars as well it gives you information pertaining to how many goals and progress how many goals have been achieved and how many have not been achieved now achieved and not achieved is with respect to the end time of your goal because if somebody sets a goal for you by saying I want to reduce 10 percent capacity within my department they would also mention by what time do they want this code to be achieved everybody gives a smart goal in which T is time so this is how you can go and identify whether your goals are achieved or not achieved also at the same time in this we we leverage the power widgets from our side with respect to all active automations within the system which gives you information with respect to how much cost is saved how much time is saved how many total automations have been deployed and what is the success rate of your automations as well additionally we have various different graphs based on departments and you also get information with respect to your future automations as to those those requests which have not been published but are in New State or in planned state how many various departments requests are in what is the total time saving or cost savings that you can achieve in this departmental automation requests that are coming in and you can probably go ahead and address them as well so that's the power of Services of service knows automation centers I take a pause here the bunch of things coming in on my screen I take a pause here and stop sharing my screen and I'll take up any questions uh we had one question um especially when we were talking about how a lot of these features are plugin based uh what is there going to be a adoption blueprint available for automation Center 2.0 um and or if you have a question on any individual Plug-In or an overview or a recommended set list of ways to implement automation Center where can we find that those materials so you we do publish docs for automation Center along with the Utah release you will have the documentation also published on the servicenow sites you can go ahead and look at the docs and it will give you a clear step guidance as to which plug-in to install and for what purpose that plugin is there all the steps that I have shown you today all the steps are clearly demarcated within the docs itself so and and more I've just given you a very high level information but docs are even more comprehensive and I think I want to piggyback on what you just said too especially in the idea of high level um one of the things that I always tell people about automation Center and RPA and all the different uh robotic processes that we are starting to have in service now is that it's easy for us developers to remember RPA and the individual things that we're going to be developing but it's things like automatic automation Center that sells the products to our implementers and to our stakeholders and to our executive and c-level people to actually throw their weights and resources and money behind these kind of things and so these high-level visualizations um are important because they reveal the value of the things that us as developers and the engineers creating all the processes and stuff like that oh that it's worth it and automation Center is something that that you all keep adding on to just so that we can keep showing that value for such a big thing that is exciting to implement because these are all automation stuff that servicenow does really well with integrating with everything else and showing value even just per department and how many things are running and how all those and tracking things automatically and revealing things that are need to be seen those are all things that demonstrate the value of the thing of the technical stuff and so it's easy to I always thought I used to teach all of my student developers that engineering and developing developing cool things it's only half the job the other half is selling your product and so automation Center is helping us do that part of it absolutely you said thank you very much for that um thank you for all that it was a good you went through all of it there was a lot of stuff too um did uh did you have any um questions or comments or did you want to add anything onto that no I think it was a great session like when I was working on the Techno deck right so a lot of things came up right and the way you explain it it was like in simple language thanks for that I think everyone who is watching the stream will appreciate it thank you for it thank you brother thank you very much for that I said well if you um do want to see other things about automation Center there are other things going on um within the Utah release go ahead and go to devlink.sn Utah to see anything automation engine that we're doing for this release you can even go to this YouTube channel and search for the past Creator toolbox the cartek was on when he demoed uh RPA for the first time for all of us and it was a very popular video so go ahead and check that out and then if you have any questions or if you have any uh things that come up you can find us uh on this YouTube channel actually um go ahead and comment and we see those comments and we can answer them there other than that thank you for joining us um for everybody uh that is tuning in around the world thank you for watching and if you're watching this after the fact uh we still watched the comments and we still can be engaging with that you can find all of us on LinkedIn you can find us all of us on social media and all of that thank you and we hope you have a good morning or a good night Wherever You Are thank you thanks everyone thank you bye [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music]