It’s been one of those weeks and I needed to get some more experience with the ansible ServiceNOW modules, specifically within Ansible Tower. It looked pretty simple and in fact it really was quite simple.
Ansible Tower neatly stores credentials within it – or externally if that fills you with joy. There isn’t a ServiceNow credential type in Ansible Tower. Undeterred, I thought I would use machine credentials, but tower has an annoying behavior of only allowing 1 instance of each credential type attached to a tower template and I am already using machine credentials in my template.
Fortunately on the left hand side of the tower ui there’s an entry labelled credential types
When creating the credential type you need to supply two (2) pieces of information. The first piece is called the Input configuration – or what the fields look like on the web ui when you create a credential of this type and secondly, the Injector configuration which details what do do with thew credentials.
In my case, the new credential type is called SNOW and i’m providing the instance name, username and password as part of the structure for this credential – via the Input configuration and then I detail that I want to store this data in environment variables that will be accessible from my playbook when run in tower.
Input configuration
fields:
- id: instance
type: string
label: Instance
- id: username
type: string
label: Username
- id: password
type: string
label: Password
secret: true
required:
- instance
- username
- password
Injector configuration
env:
SN_INSTANCE: '{{instance}}'
SN_PASSWORD: '{{password}}'
SN_USERNAME: '{{username}}'The way you use them in your playbook is quite simple. The following is a snippet of playbook showing that.
- name: Create an incident
snow_record:
username: '{{ lookup("env", "SN_USERNAME") }}'
password: '{{ lookup("env", "SN_PASSWORD") }}'
instance: '{{ lookup("env", "SN_INSTANCE") }}'
state: present
data:
short_description: "This is a test incident opened by Ansible"
severity: 3
priority: 2
register: new_incident