Bridging the gap: proactive IT operations with the ServiceNow Event plug-in Send Event action

In today’s fast-paced enterprise environments, the intersection of workload automation and IT Service Management (ITSM) is critical to maintaining system reliability and minimizing downtime. Traditionally, resolving a critical job failure required manual ticket creation, triage, and routing, introducing delays and room for error.

With the ServiceNow Event plug-in for Workload Automation, enterprises can transition from reactive firefighting to proactive, automated incident orchestration.

1. What is the Send Event Action?
The ServiceNow Event integration for Workload Automation bridges the gap between enterprise scheduling and service management, ensuring that critical scheduling activities are immediately reflected in your ITSM workflows.
While the plug-in has long supported an Open Incident action to log support tickets, the introduction of the Send Event action enables you to transmit structured, real-time data to ServiceNow Event Management. ServiceNow can therefore use its correlation rules and alerting mechanisms to manage and resolve issues automatically.

2. Key capabilities & advantages
Integrating the Send Event action into your Workload Automation environment delivers several benefits:

• From ticketing to event orchestration: Instead of logging generic incidents that require manual intervention, you send structured alerts directly to ServiceNow's Event Management system.
• Action variety: Choose to either open an incident or trigger a custom event, or even both, depending on your business needs.
• Attribute overrides: While global settings can be set in optman, you can override connection settings directly within the Workload Designer or from composer when needed.
• Highly granular metadata: The Send Event action lets you pass rich context, giving ServiceNow the exact details it needs to analyze root causes.

3. Business Scenario: from manual triage to automated response
Let's look at how the Send Event action transforms a common IT crisis.

The "before" state: manual incident management

1. Job failure: A critical nightly database backup job fails.
2. Generic ticket: Workload Automation triggers an Open Incident action, generating a generic support ticket in ServiceNow.
3. Manual triage: The ticket sits in an unassigned queue until a service desk agent manually reads it, attempts to evaluate the priority, and routes it to the database administration team.
4. Delays: If the agent is busy or routes it to the wrong team, resolution is delayed.

The "after" state: automated event orchestration with Send Event
By incorporating the Send Event action into your event rules, the workflow is completely transformed:

1. Event trigger: The mission-critical database backup job fails.
2. Automated hand-off: An event rule immediately fires a Send Event action, transmitting structured metadata, including specific error codes, severity levels, and affected node identifiers directly to ServiceNow’s Event Management.
3. Intelligent routing and correlation: ServiceNow receives the structured JSON payload. ServiceNow correlates this event with existing infrastructure alerts, automatically identifies the database server, and instantly routes a high-priority alert directly to the application team.
4. Rapid resolution: The team receives a precise, data-rich alert with all necessary diagnostic data attached, enabling them to start root-cause analysis immediately without manual routing delays.

4. Setup and configuration
Setting up the ServiceNow Event plug-in involves three simple phases: installation, global configuration, and event rule design.

Phase 1: Installation & Verification
To enable the ServiceNow Event integration in your on-premises distributed environment:

1. Copy the ServiceNow Event plug-in file: Copy the plug-in's .jar file to the eventPlugin folder.

     2. Restart WebSphere Liberty

​Phase 2: Global Configuration via optman
To prevent rule creators from needing to input credentials for every rule, define default connection values globally:

1. Open your command-line interface.
2. Use optman to set the global ServiceNow parameters:
   • servicenowUrl (or nu): Set your ServiceNow instance URL (for example, https://xxxxxx.service-now.com/).
   • servicenowUserName (or nn): Provide the service account username.
   • servicenowUserPassword (or np): Input the encrypted password.

    3. Run optman change to modify the global settings and verify them using optman list .
Note: These default values are ignored and overridden if you specify connection fields directly inside an event rule.

Phase 3: Adding the Send Event action to an event rule from the Workload Designer
​With the plug-in installed and configured, you are ready to design your automated event rule:

1. Log into the Dynamic Workload Console and open the Workload Designer page.
2. In the Explore area, click Create New and select Event rule from the list.
3. Define event rule information.
4. Click Add events, select an event and define information about it.

    5. Click Add actions, then select ServiceNow from the pop-up panel.

    6. Click Send Event, and then close the panel.
    7. Configure action parameters. These parameters will appear as entries in the ServiceNow interface.

   8. Save the event rule.

5. Verification and monitoring
Once your rule is deployed, you can verify that communication is working smoothly:

1. Trigger the event: Submit a job stream containing a job that will trigger the event rule.

    2. Monitor the event rule: From the Dynamic Workload Console, go to Monitor Event rules and run   a query on your rule. You should see whether the action was processed successfully.

  3. ServiceNow Dashboard: Log into your ServiceNow instance and navigate to your Event Management dashboard. You will find the received event populated with the precise parameters and metadata you defined in the Workload Designer.

Conclusion
With the Send Event action, you can eliminate the delays of manual triage, establish real-time operational context, and pave the way for automated root-cause analysis and faster resolution.
Ready to connect your enterprise scheduling with ServiceNow Event Management? Download the ServiceNow Event plug-in today to orchestrate your operational ecosystem effortlessly!

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Maria Teresa Caira, Senior Software Engineer 
Maria Teresa is a Software Engineer with a long standing experience in software development. Currently Maria Teresa works as Software Test Engineer in the Workload Automation team, where she takes the ownership of Dynamic Workload Console Test Automation project. Maria Teresa has a University Diploma in Computer Science and she is currently based in the Rome Laboratory of HCL Software.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mariateresa-caira-69259ba5 

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Gianluca Seghetti, Senior Software Architect 
Gianluca is a Software Engineer with long standing experience in software testing and test automation disciplines. He is currently covering the role of SVT leader for Workload Automation products family. Gianluca has a degree in Chemistry and in Industrial Chemistry and is currently based in the HCL Products and Platforms Rome software development laboratory.

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Veronica Tesei, Technical Writer
Veronica has been part of the HCLSoftware team since 2022, creating documentation for Universal Orchestrator and Workload Automation. She is also a key contributor to the YouTube channel's video content and a dedicated presence on the community forums. Based in Tuscany, she balances her technical work with cooking, cozy Nintendo Switch gaming, countryside walks, and relaxing with her cats.

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