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ServiceNow

Instruction Management

Managing the Tachyon instructions made available to ServiceNow.

Tachyon provides a large number of instructions available from the Tachyon exchange and used to investigate devices or fix issues across your entire enterprise. Using the ITSM Connect application you can now access the same capabilities from within ServiceNow. To enable this, the instructions available in Tachyon should be synchronized and cached in ServiceNow to allow the running of instructions and collection of responses directly in a ServiceNow incident.

Instruction Management in Tachyon

The Tachyon instructions that are available to any ServiceNow user with the x_1e_connect.Tachyon_User role, must be defined in Tachyon by setting the appropriate permissions on the proxy user role in Tachyon, for more details see Preparation: Adding the ITSM Connect app proxy user to Tachyon.

Enabling or disabling approval for a Tachyon Instruction

An admin user can enable or disable approval for a Tachyon Instruction by setting the state of 'Is Approval Required' checkbox to checked or unchecked on the Instruction definition detail page. The admin user can also update its value from the Instruction Definitions page by setting the value in the Is Approval Required column to true or false.

Note

  • If approvals are disabled for the application from 'App Configuration' page then even approval is enabled for a Tachyon instruction then too it will not ask for approval at the time of execution.

  • An admin user will retrieved Tachyon Instruction from 'App Configuration' page.

Instruction_Def_Is_approval.png

Note

  • If approvals are disabled for the application from 'App Configuration' page and on the other hand, approval is enabled for a Tachyon instruction, then it will not ask for approval at the time of execution for the instruction.

  • An admin user can retrieve Tachyon Instruction from 'App Configuration' page.

Instruction definitions page

All the instructions available in ServiceNow can be seen on the Instruction Definitions page. All the basic details about the instructions, such as: the instruction name, description, Instruction Set etc. are displayed on this page. The Type of the instruction is also visible on the page and tells you whether an instruction is an action or a question.

Instructions can be automatically disabled and marked as inactive by displaying false in the Active column, please refer to Updating Instruction sets in Tachyon and automatically disabled instructions for more details about automatically disabled instructions. The contents of the Instruction Definitions page are filtered so that only active instructions are displayed on the page by default.

App_Config_Retrieve_Inst.png
Instructions_Definitions_All_instr.png

In order to see all the instructions, including the inactive ones, the default filter should be removed by clicking the All link just before the filter condition.

Instructions_Definitions_All.png
Instruction detail page

When you click an Instruction name link on the Instruction Definitions page, the Instruction Definition page, showing the details for the selected instruction, is opened. This page has all the additional details for an instruction not displayed on the instruction definitions page.

Specifically, the list Instruction Parameters required by an instruction is shown on this page. The Instruction Parameters table shows the Parameter name, Parameter Type, the Default Value and the Allowed Values. The allowed parameter types are free text and value picker.

Instruction_Parameters.png
Parameter detail page

When you click the Parameter Type link on the Instruction Parameters table, the Instruction Parameter details page is displayed. All the details for the selected parameter are displayed on this page.

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Updating Instruction sets in Tachyon and automatically disabled instructions

Instructions or instruction sets that are assigned to the proxy user specified in Tachyon User Name field of the API Configuration Page may be deleted, updated, or permissions changed within Tachyon. In this case instructions are no longer available to the ITSM Connect app users. These instructions are not deleted from the app, instead they are automatically disabled (Active status set to false).

When an administrator user tries to retrieve the latest set of instructions using the Retrieve Instructions button, a new set of instructions is returned from Tachyon, which might have added, updated or deleted instructions. Depending on which of those states an instruction belongs to there are three actions taken:

  • New instructions are added to the ServiceNow database directly.

  • Updated instructions are modified in the ServiceNow database and the updates made available to users from that point on.

  • Instructions that are deleted from Tachyon and therefore no longer available to 1E ITSM Connect users are not deleted from ServiceNow database instead they are automatically disabled by setting their Active status to false. This ensures data integrity by providing full support for the historical data if any of these instructions have been run.