“March on. Do not tarry. To go forward is to move toward perfection. March on, and fear not the thorns, or the sharp stones on life’s path.”
— Kahlil Gibran
Last time, we jumped into the App Engine Studio and began the process of creating our new Service Account Management app. We created the app and the two tables and now we need to edit the tables to add fields. We won’t necessarily add all of the fields that we need right now, as we don’t know exactly what we will be needing to support all of the processes just yet, but we will add enough to get things started. To begin, let’s jump back into the studio and pull up the dashboard for our new Scoped Application.
Let’s start with the Service Account table by clicking on the ellipses at the end of the row and select the Edit option. That brings up a series of modal help screens that we need to click through to get to where we can actually add a new field.
The first field that we want to add is the reference to our type table, so we give it a label, which generates a name, and then we select Reference from the available field types.
Selecting Reference from the drop-down opens up yet another pick list, which is a list of tables from which we will select our Service Account Type table.
Now that we have added the type field to our table, we can use the same procedure add additional fields. For now, we will just add the fields that we think that we will need to support our processes, and then add more later if we find that other data points are needed. At this point, we will just include the following:
- Active Flag
- Account User ID/Name
- Owner
- Owning Group
- Provisioned Date
- Retired Date
- Last Attestation Date
- Last Attested By
Other things that we might need could possibly include a link to the Requested Item that created the account or the workflow that created the account, but let’s set those ideas aside for now and just focus on the basics. Here is the complete table definition after adding all of the fields.
Now we need to do the same thing for our technology type table, which will have even fewer fields.
That completes the work on the tables for now, but before we move on, let’s add a couple of rows to our type table for the two types of examples that we will use for testing, one that can be fulfilled through automation and another that we will fulfill manually. For the automated example, we can simply use ServiceNow Service Accounts, and for the manual example, let’s do Active Directory. To begin entering data from the App Engine Studio, pull up the dashboard for the app and select the PREVIEW link for the desired table.
This will bring up an empty list of records for this new table where you can click on the New button to bring up the data entry form.
Once we enter all of the data for our two example types, we are returned to the list view where we can see our two new records.
Now that we have our tables and control data in place, we can turn our attention to the process of requesting a new service account and fulfilling that request. Requests for new Service Accounts will be made through the Service Catalog, so we will need to build a new Catalog Item for these requests. In the App Engine Studio, a Catalog Item is a type of Experience, so to create a new Catalog Item, we will click on the Add button in the Experience section header.
This brings up the Experience type selection screen where we will select Catalog Item from the available options.
This brings up a splash screen where we have to scroll down and click on the Begin button.
After clicking on Begin, we can enter the details for our new Catalog Item.
Once you enter all of the requested data and click on the Continue button, the new Catalog Item is created.
After you sit and watch that screen for a bit, you are eventually taken to the completion screen.
Of course, that’s not all there is to a Catalog Item. We will need to collect some data from the requester, including things like the type of Service Account requested and the desired user ID. Also, we will need to build some kind of fulfillment workflow that will get the account created. Next time, we will hit that Edit catalog item button and see if we can take care of all of that.
