Onboard a new tool using DevOps generic playbook

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Onboard a new tool using DevOps generic playbook

    ServiceNow's DevOps Change includes a pre-built generic playbook designed to help customers onboard new tools efficiently within the DevOps Change Workspace. This guided, task-oriented playbook provides a consistent and visual approach to configuring custom tool integrations, streamlining the onboarding process.

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    Key Features

    • Tool Capability Identification: Customers must first determine the capabilities of their tool, such as code, plan, or orchestration. The playbook is structured in stages aligned with these capabilities, with specific activities like connecting to the tool, configuring access, importing data, and associating pipeline steps for orchestration tools.
    • Activity Definitions: Each playbook activity is linked to an activity definition (AD), such as creating the tool, configuring and testing, selecting associated objects, importing data, associating services, and summary. These definitions are managed in the sndevopscapabilityactivitymapping table to dynamically present relevant stages and activities based on the tool's capabilities.
    • Conditional Activity Configuration: The system allows enabling or disabling specific activities per tool by updating conditions, ensuring that activities irrelevant to a tool (e.g., data import for GitLab or JFrog) are excluded from the onboarding flow.
    • Activity UI Configuration: The user interface experience for each activity can be customized through Activity UIs (AUIs). Multiple AUIs can be configured for an activity definition, and the appropriate UI is rendered dynamically based on conditions, allowing tailoring of the onboarding experience per tool.

    Practical Outcomes for ServiceNow Customers

    • Customers can onboard a wide variety of custom tools using a standardized, guided approach that reduces configuration errors and accelerates integration timelines.
    • The modular stage and activity design allows flexibility to accommodate tools with different capabilities and streamline the onboarding process by skipping irrelevant steps.
    • Dynamic UI configurations enhance user experience by providing tailored guidance during tool setup, improving clarity and reducing onboarding complexity.
    • Maintaining activity definitions and capability mappings within ServiceNow tables allows customers to extend and customize the playbook for future tools without extensive redevelopment.

    DevOps Change has a pre-build playbook setup for users to configure a new tool. Custom tool integrations can be created using the guided playbook experience in the DevOps Change Workspace.

    Playbooks provide end users with a visual, task-oriented guide with the steps to complete a process, ensuring a consistent experience for tool onboarding. For detailed information about playbooks, see About Playbook Experience.

    Perform the following steps to onboard your custom tool using the DevOps generic playbook.

    1. Identify tool capabilities

    To configure a tool using the generic playbook, first you must identify the capabilities supported by the tool. A tool can have one or more capabilities like code, plan, and orchestration.

    The Generic playbook consists of the following stages and each stage has its related activities:
    1. Connect to a tool
      1. Connect to a tool
      2. Specify tool access
      3. Configure the tool
    2. Capability

      Capability can be of type plan, code, or orchestrate. If the tool has multiple capabilities, multiple stages exist with the capability name.

      1. Select to track
      2. Import data
      3. Associate (This activity is for the Orchestration tools to associate pipeline steps)
    3. Summary

    This is how a playbook with multiple capabilities looks like:Playbook with multiple capabilities.

    2. Configure Activity Definitions

    Each Activity in a playbook is associated to an activity definition. DevOps has the following activity definitions:
    • DevOps CreateTool AD
    • DevOps Configure & Test AD
    • DevOps Select Associated Objects AD
    • DevOps Import Data AD
    • DevOps Associate Services AD
    • DevOps Summary AD
    For more information, see Exploring playbooks and About Playbook Experience.

    The DevOps table sn_devops_capability_activity_mapping has been created to maintain associations between Activity definitions and capabilities. This table configuration is used to dynamically render the stages and activities for a tool. You can update the conditions as needed to either enable or disable a particular activity for a tool.

    The Tool Capability Activity Mappings table.

    For example, tools like GitLab and JFrog don’t support data import. So you don't require the Data Import activity for such tools. In that case, you must add the logic in the condition column to return false for these types of tools. See the following image as a reference:Example where data import logic is false.

    3. Configure Activity UI for the Activity Definition

    Playbook Activity UIs define the experience type and UI template rendered to users while managing Playbooks. You can configure multiple Activity UIs for an Activity Definition and render any one dynamically based on the condition evaluation.

    DevOps has the following AUIs for Create Tool activity. Except this, all other activity definitions have only one Activity UI.

    DevOps AUIs.

    You can configure any one the Activity UI based on the requirement.

    Identify the required activity UI and add your tool in the condition builder so that the UI gets effected in the playbook for the tool.Override playbook activity.

    Result

    After completing these steps, your tool can be onboarded using the DevOps generic playbook.