Use ServiceNow As a Content Source

ServiceNow stores tickets and help content. You can connect it with SearchUnify to find three ServiceNow content types quickly: incidents, knowledge articles, and knowledge questions.

PERMISSIONS.

SearchUnify ignores user permissions during searches. All indexed files can be search by all users.

PREREQUISITES

A user must have Admin access to crawl ServiceNow objects in SearchUnify including, incidents, knowledge_base_questions, and knowledge_base_articles.

Establish a Connection

  1. Navigate to Content Sources and click Add New Content Sources.

  1. Find ServiceNow and click Add.

  2. Under the Authentication tab, enter the required details:

    • Name. Give your content source a lebel.

    • Client URL. Enter your ServiceNow instance URL.

    • Language. Select the content language(s) from the dropdown.

    • Authentication Method. Select either Basic or OAuth for authenticating your ServiceNow content source.

      If you have selected Basic, then enter your ServiceNow instance Username and Password.

      If you have selected OAuth, enter your ServiceNow Client ID and Client Secret. Follow the instructions in How to Prepare Your ServiceNow Instance for OAuth Authentication? to generate a Client ID and Client Secret.

  3. Click Connect.

Set Up Crawl Frequency

The first crawl is always manual and is performed after configuring the content source. In Choose A Date, select a date to start crawling; the data created after the selected date will be crawled. For now, keep the frequency to its default value Never and click Set and move to the next section.

Select Content Types and Fields for Indexing

  1. Under the Rules tab, you can see the three objects - incident, knowledge_base_questions, and knowledge_base_articles in the By Content Type subtab.

  2. Click to see the list of pre-configured fields.

    Note. You can add or remove content fields per your choice. But it's inadvisable for non-admins to add or remove any fields here.

  3. Switch to By Projects subtab. Select the knowledge bases that you want to index and click Save.

You have successfully added ServiceNow as a content source in SearchUnify. Perform a manual crawl to start indexing data in SearchUnify.

Related

Difference between Manual and Frequency Crawls

Find and Replace

Those on the Q2 '24 release or a later version will notice a new button next to each object on the Rules screen. It resembles a magnifying glass and is labeled "Find and Replace." You can use this feature to find and replace values in a single field or across all fields. The changes occur in the search index, not in your content source.

Find and Replace proves valuable in various scenarios. A common use case is when a product name is altered. Suppose your product name has changed from "SearchUnify" to "SUnify," and you wish for the search result titles to immediately reflect this change.

  1. To make the change, click .

  2. Now, choose either "All" or a specific content source field from the "Enter Name" dropdown. When "All" is selected, any value in the "Find" column is replaced with the corresponding value in the "Replace" column across all content source fields. If a particular field is chosen, the old value is replaced with the new value solely within the selected field.

  3. Enter the value to be replaced in the Find column and the new value in the Replace column. Both columns accept regular expressions.

  4. Click Add. You will see a warning if you are replacing a value in all fields.

  5. Save the settings.

  6. Run a crawl for the updated values to reflect in search results.

After the First Crawl

Return to the Content Sources screen and click in Actions. The number of indexed documents is updated after the crawl is complete. You can view crawl progress in in Actions. Documentation on crawl progress is in View Crawl Logs.

Once the first crawl is complete, click in Actions open the content source for editing, and set a crawl frequency.

  1. In Choose a Date, click to fire up a calendar and select a date. Only the data after the selected date is indexed.

  2. Use the Frequency dropdown to select how often SearchUnify should index the data. For illustration, the frequency has been set to Weekly and Tuesday has been chosen as the crawling day. Whenever the Frequency is other than Never, a third dropdown appears where you can specify the interval. Also, whenever Frequency is set to Hourly, then manual crawls are disabled.

  3. Click Set to save crawl frequency settings. On clicking Set, you are taken to the Rules tab.

Data Deletion and SU Index

All the data deleted from ServiceNow is removed from the SearchUnify index within 6 days (kNowledge_baSe_queStion and kNowledge_baSe_article) or 7 days (incident ).