Create an IBM Cloud service account

  • Release version: Washingtondc
  • Updated February 1, 2024
  • 2 minutes to read

    • During Cloud Provisioning and Governance Day 1 setup, you added one service account to the cloud account. To compartmentalize your infrastructure or to include different datacenters, you can add another service account. A particular datacenter, however, cannot be selected in more than one service account in a cloud account.

    Before you begin

    Role required: sn_cmp.cloud_admin

    About this task

    A service account is a secure record on your instance that stores the credential and access information for your provider account. Discovery uses the information to access your provider account to get data on each resource in each specified datacenter.
    In this example, you added the service account named ProviderB-ServiceAccount-1 and selected three datacenters to include in the cloud account:
    Figure 1. A service account with three selected datacenters
    A second service account with three selected datacenters
    Note:
    Cloud providers often use different names for accounts, regions, and credential settings. Because the ServiceNow application supports several cloud providers, the app uses general-purpose names for the settings.

    Procedure

    1. On your instance, navigate to Orchestration > Credentials & Connections > Credentials.
    2. Click New, select IBM Credentials, and then enter a unique and meaningful Name for the credential set (in this example, IBM Van Credentials).
      If you use more than one set of IBM credentials, set the Order value (credential sets with lower values are checked first). In the following steps, you paste the IBM credential values into the Credentials form on your instance.
    3. Log in to your Softlayer account at control.softlayer.com.
    4. Navigate to Account > Users > User List.
    5. On the Users page, click View for the appropriate API KEY (or generate an API key if needed).
      Softlayer Users page
    6. From the API Key popup:
      1. Paste the full API User value into the Softlayer API User field on your instance.
      2. Paste the API Key value into the Softlayer API Key field.
      Copy Softlayer values to the IBM Credentials form
    7. Log in to your Bluemix account at console.bluemix.net.
    8. Navigate to Manage > Account > Users.
    9. Click Platform API Keys, click the Create button, and then enter a Name and Description for the key.
      Create an IBM Platform API key
    10. On the success page, click Download to download the key to a local JSON file.
    11. Open the file (typically named apiKey-n.json), paste the apiKey value into the Bluemix API Key field on your instance, and then click Update.
      Copy Bluemix apiKey value to the IBM Credentials formSoftlayer API user?
      You have created a record of the IBM credentials on your instance. Next, you create the service account that is associated with the credentials.
    12. Navigate to Cloud Admin Portal > Service Accounts.
    13. Click New, enter a unique and meaningful Name, and then fill in the form.
      Field Description
      Account ID Enter the IBM software user number that the instance should use to access the IBM Cloud Console.
      Discovery credentials Select the credentials record that you created earlier.
      Datacenter URL Leave the Datacenter URL field blank.
      Datacenter type Select IBM Datacenter [cmdb_ci_ibm_datacenter].
      Datacenter discovery status Auto-generated value: Status and timestamp of the last execution of Discovery on the datacenter.
    14. Click Update or Submit.
      The system creates the service account and displays the list of all discovered datacenters.
    15. Repeat the process to add as many service accounts as needed.