Ansible for ServiceNow

Location: On-Site or Online
Pricing: $1,250 per seat (6-seat minimum)
Length: 4 Days

Course Summary

Ansible for ServiceNow is a practical, hands-on course designed for engineers and automation practitioners who want to integrate Ansible with ServiceNow to automate IT service management (ITSM) workflows.

Students learn how to design, read, and maintain Ansible playbooks that interact with ServiceNow using REST APIs to create, update, query, and close records such as incidents, requests, changes, and CMDB items. The course emphasizes real-world automation patterns that connect infrastructure automation with enterprise service workflows.

By the end of the course, students are comfortable using Ansible as a control plane between infrastructure, applications, and ServiceNow—reducing manual work, improving consistency, and enforcing operational process at scale.

Course Outline

Day 1 – Foundations: Ansible Meets ServiceNow

• 💬 Lecture: Automation beyond infrastructure – why ServiceNow matters

• 💬 Lecture: Ansible architecture for API-driven platforms

• 💬 Lecture: ServiceNow platform overview and core tables

• 💬 Lecture: REST APIs, authentication models, and tokens

• 💬 Lecture: YAML fundamentals for API automation

• ⚙️ Lab: Installing and validating Ansible

• ⚙️ Lab: Exploring Ansible modules and collections with ansible-doc

• ⚙️ Lab: Creating inventories for API-only automation

• ⚙️ Lab: Defining variables for ServiceNow connectivity

• ⚙️ Lab: Configuring ansible.cfg for HTTP API workflows

• ⚙️ Lab: Validating authentication to ServiceNow

Day 2 – Working with ServiceNow Records

• 💬 Lecture: Using Ansible as an API client (uri and ServiceNow modules)

• 💬 Lecture: Understanding ServiceNow tables, fields, and sys_ids

• 💬 Lecture: CRUD operations with REST APIs

• ⚙️ Lab: Querying incidents from ServiceNow

• ⚙️ Lab: Creating new incident records with Ansible

• ⚙️ Lab: Updating existing incidents

• ⚙️ Lab: Closing incidents programmatically

• ⚙️ Lab: Parsing and storing JSON responses

• ⚙️ Lab: Handling pagination and filtering results

• ⚙️ Lab: Validating API responses and error codes

Day 3 – Orchestrating ITSM Workflows

• 💬 Lecture: Variables, facts, and precedence in API-driven playbooks

• 💬 Lecture: Conditional execution using API response data

• ⚙️ Lab: Running tasks conditionally based on incident state

• ⚙️ Lab: Using loops to process multiple ServiceNow records

• ⚙️ Lab: Controlling execution with tags and limits

• 💬 Lecture: Change, request, and approval workflows

• ⚙️ Lab: Creating change requests with Ansible

• ⚙️ Lab: Updating change state during automation runs

• ⚙️ Lab: Linking infrastructure tasks to ServiceNow records

• 💬 Lecture: Error handling and debugging API workflows

• ⚙️ Lab: Debugging failed ServiceNow API calls

• ⚙️ Lab: Using debug, fail, and verbosity flags

Day 4 – Best Practices and Real-World ServiceNow Automation

• 💬 Lecture: Designing safe automation with ITSM guardrails

• 💬 Lecture: CMDB integration and data consistency

• ⚙️ Lab: Querying CI records from the CMDB

• ⚙️ Lab: Updating CMDB attributes with Ansible

• 💬 Lecture: Writing maintainable and scalable automation

• ⚙️ Lab: Refactoring playbooks for clarity and reuse

• ⚙️ Lab: Structuring reusable roles for ServiceNow automation

• 💬 Lecture: Testing and validation concepts

• ⚙️ Lab: Adding assertions to validate ServiceNow responses

• ⚙️ Lab: Failing safely when records are not in expected states

• 💬 Lecture: Real-world Ansible + ServiceNow patterns

• ⚙️ Lab: Building an end-to-end automation workflow

• ⚙️ Lab: Creating or updating records before automation

• ⚙️ Lab: Executing infrastructure tasks

• ⚙️ Lab: Updating ServiceNow with results and closure notes

Outcomes

Students who complete Ansible for ServiceNow will be able to:

• Integrate Ansible with ServiceNow using REST APIs

• Automate incident, request, change, and CMDB workflows

• Use Ansible as a bridge between ITSM and infrastructure

• Build conditional, process-aware automation

• Troubleshoot and debug API-driven Ansible playbooks

• Apply best practices for enterprise service automation