Secure ITSM Mobile App Integrating SolarWinds and ServiceNow® Platforms

Customer

The Customer is a Pennsylvania-based company that provides remote database administration as well as 24/7 support and monitoring services.

Challenge

The Customer helps different organizations manage their database-related issues remotely and for these purposes provides them with SolarWinds and ServiceNow platforms.

While undergoing the process of rebranding, the Customer realized that they were dissatisfied with the level of their ServiceNow and SolarWinds services’ accessibility. Although the Customer had a web portal that connected these two platforms, it didn’t provide the necessary level of integration between them and didn’t allow its users to be more mobile at work. This all led the Customer to a decision to create a cost-effective ITSM mobile app for their customers to be able to use ServiceNow and SolarWinds on-the-go, within just one application. They wanted a custom mobile app specifically, because using the already existing ServiceNow mobile application wouldn’t provide the needed level of interconnectivity with SolarWinds.

Because of a number of ServiceNow features, the Customer was concerned whether the mobile app would be able to work swiftly and promptly, and decided to ask ScienceSoft to carry out performance testing as well.

To provide their customers with a stable and secure service, the Customer also wanted the system of the solution to be fault-tolerant.

Solution

Integration Hub

To ensure the needed level of integration between ServiceNow and SolarWinds, ScienceSoft built an additional server – Integration Hub – into the Customer’s system. Our team deployed all business logic into this server making it function as a back end of the mobile app.

To ensure cost-effectiveness, ScienceSoft proposed to use PHP for back-end development.

In addition, our team managed to make the system fault-tolerant within the restrictions of a tight budget, using a limited but sufficient number of system elements.

Mobile app

Since the solution needed to be simple and cost-effective, our team proposed a cross-platform approach to mobile app development and decided to use Xamarin platform.

To address the issue connected with ServiceNow’s promptness, our ServiceNow consulting team proposed to optimize queries and implement data caching. This way, the app works quicker but due to our team’s tuning ServiceNow it is still able to show changes that are absent in cached data.

To make the app more convenient, ServiceNow credentials are used for authorization. Besides, the app sends users notifications in order to keep them informed about all activities in the system that concern them.

Results

ScienceSoft’s team created an ITSM mobile application that integrated SolarWinds and ServiceNow. While working on the project, our team solved a number of development issues, made the application run smoothly and managed to establish that end users tend to like the app’s interface. Due to our work, the Customer now has an application that allows their customers to be more mobile at work, which enhances the value of their cooperation with the Customer.

At the final stages of the project, ScienceSoft successfully carried out performance testing. And when the Customer decided to involve a third party to perform a security audit of the application, it revealed that our solution complies with all security requirements.

Technologies and Tools

ServiceNow, SolarWinds, Xamarin, PHP, MySQL, Apache JMeter