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Overview

The ServiceNow Workflow Approval catalog in the Template Catalog provides a prebuilt integration that allows administrators to insert approval-based gates in resource provisioning workflows using ServiceNow incidents. This enables organizations to enforce policy compliance, track workflows, and maintain an auditable trail for environment provisioning, updates, and deletions.

When a resource or environment is launched, a ServiceNow ticket is automatically created. Rafay then polls for the ticket status and only proceeds once the ticket is explicitly approved or rejected within the ServiceNow system.

Note
This blog post provides a detailed overview of the end-to-end workflow for enforcing ServiceNow-based approval process.

Use Cases

  • Enforce approvals before provisioning, updating, or deleting environments or resources
  • Integrate ServiceNow as a centralized approval system across multiple projects or tenants
  • Enhance governance and auditability with incident tracking
  • Customize workflows with detailed request context for reviewers

Key Features

  • Automatically creates and tracks ServiceNow incidents tied to provisioning workflows
  • Monitors ticket status via polling and proceeds only after approval
  • Supports default and user-defined ServiceNow incident fields (e.g., urgency, category)
  • Allows customers to extend input parameters without new releases
  • Includes debug support to aid self-service troubleshooting
  • Compatible with Tokyo, Vancouver, and Washington ServiceNow releases
  • Secure authentication via API token and username

Pre-Requisites

Before enabling ServiceNow Workflow Approval:

  • A working ServiceNow instance with accessible FQDN
  • A ServiceNow account with appropriate roles (e.g., itil_admin, itil, personalize_choices)
  • API credentials (username and token)
  • Defined approval and rejection ticket statuses (e.g., Resolved, Canceled)
  • Ensure timezone handling is in UTC as required by ServiceNow APIs
  • Optionally configure incident fields like:
    • urgency (High, Medium, Low)
    • impact (High, Medium, Low)
    • category, short_description, assigned_to, u_notifiers

Admin and Developer Responsibilities

Platform Admin

  • Configures and shares ServiceNow workflow handler across projects
  • Verifies ServiceNow connectivity and role permissions
  • Enables "Skip On Destroy" to avoid approval requests during deletion

Developer

  • Launches environments with workflow handlers attached
  • Views approval status and incident details in deployment logs

For approval-based environment provisioning using ServiceNow, see the ServiceNow Workflow Approval Guide.