I wanted to share our implementation of automated asset synchronization between ServiceNow CMDB and SAP ERP using IntegrationHub. We needed bidirectional sync for hardware assets, software licenses, and contract information to maintain a single source of truth for our asset compliance audits.
The challenge was handling data inconsistencies between systems - SAP uses different field naming conventions and data formats than ServiceNow. We also needed robust error handling because network timeouts between systems were causing sync failures that required manual intervention.
Our solution leverages the IntegrationHub SAP spoke with custom field mappings and an automated error recovery workflow. We’re now syncing 15,000+ asset records daily with 99.7% success rate. The implementation took about 6 weeks from planning to production deployment.
Happy to share details on the architecture, field mapping strategies, and error handling mechanisms we built.
I’m impressed with your 99.7% success rate. What types of errors make up that 0.3% failure rate, and how does your automated error recovery handle them? We’ve been struggling with timeout errors on our SAP integrations - the spoke action times out but the SAP transaction actually completes, leading to duplicate records when we retry.
This is exactly what we’re planning to implement next quarter. What version of the SAP spoke are you using, and did you encounter any limitations with the out-of-box spoke actions? We’re particularly concerned about handling custom SAP fields that don’t map directly to standard CMDB attributes.
Great question on conflict resolution. We implemented a source-of-truth hierarchy based on field types. Financial data (purchase price, cost center) always comes from SAP. Operational data (location, assigned user, status) comes from ServiceNow. We maintain a last_modified timestamp in both systems and flag conflicts in a reconciliation queue for manual review when both systems update the same field type within the sync window.
For sync frequency, we run incremental syncs every 4 hours during business hours and a full reconciliation sync nightly. Real-time sync was considered but rejected due to network latency concerns - our SAP system is in a different data center with 200-300ms latency.
How did you handle the bidirectional sync conflicts? For example, if an asset is updated in both ServiceNow and SAP between sync cycles, which system wins? We’re designing a similar integration and struggling with the conflict resolution strategy. Also curious about your sync frequency - is it real-time or batch-based?
The source-of-truth hierarchy approach makes sense. Did you build the reconciliation queue as a custom table, or use an existing ServiceNow feature? Also, what happens during the 4-hour gaps - do users see stale data, or is there some indicator that sync is pending?
We’re using SAP spoke version 2.4 on Tokyo release. The out-of-box spoke actions worked well for standard asset fields, but we did create three custom spoke actions for our specific SAP Z-tables (custom tables). For custom field mapping, we built a transform map table that acts as a translation layer between SAP field names and CMDB attributes. This made it easy to adjust mappings without modifying the integration flows themselves. I can share the transform map structure if that would help your planning.