When a critical alert fires at 2 AM, the last thing your on-call engineer should be doing is manual administrative work. Yet, for many teams, that’s exactly what happens. You see the alert in your monitoring tool, then you have to switch contexts, open a new browser tab, log into your ITSM platform, and manually create an incident—all while your systems are failing.

This “swivel-chairing” between tools is slow, error-prone, and a significant drag on your Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).

We believe this crucial first step of incident response should be completely automated. That’s why we’re excited to announce our new, native integration with ServiceNow.

This integration bridges the gap between Netdata’s real-time, per-second monitoring and ServiceNow’s structured incident management workflow. You can now automatically create and manage incidents in ServiceNow the moment a Netdata alert is triggered, ensuring that every critical issue is formally tracked without any manual intervention.

Why This Matters for Your Workflow

By connecting Netdata Cloud directly to ServiceNow, you can:

• Accelerate Incident Response: Eliminate the manual first step of incident creation. An incident is logged in your system of record the instant a problem is detected, allowing your team to focus immediately on diagnosis and resolution.
• Eliminate Manual Toil: Stop the error-prone process of copy-pasting alert details. The integration automatically populates ServiceNow incidents with rich, contextual information directly from Netdata.
• Create a Single Source of Truth: Ensure that every important alert from your infrastructure is captured and tracked within your formal ITSM process, improving accountability and post-mortem analysis.
• Improve Post-mortems: With every incident properly documented from the start, your team has a more accurate and complete dataset to analyze during incident reviews, leading to better long-term reliability.

How It Works

The setup is straightforward and takes just a few minutes. The integration uses ServiceNow’s Event Management plugin to create incidents from events sent by Netdata Cloud.

Prerequisites:

• The Event Management plugin must be enabled on your ServiceNow instance.
• You’ll need a ServiceNow user with the evt_mgmt_admin role for API access.

High-Level Setup Steps:

1. In ServiceNow: Create a dedicated integration user and assign it the evt_mgmt_admin role. Ensure it has a password for API authentication.
2. In Netdata Cloud: Navigate to Space settings → Alerts & Notifications. Click + Add configuration and select the ServiceNow integration.
3. Configure the Integration: Enter your ServiceNow instance URL, along with the username and password for the integration user you created. Select which Rooms and notification types should be sent to ServiceNow.

Putting it into Practice: An Example Flow

Imagine a critical disk_space_usage alert is triggered for a production database node.

1. Netdata Cloud immediately detects the alert and, based on your configuration, sends a new event to your ServiceNow instance.
2. ServiceNow’s Event Management module receives the event and automatically creates a new, properly formatted incident.
3. The incident is pre-populated with crucial context from the Netdata alert, including:
   • The alert name, severity, and status.
   • The node and chart the alert originated from.
   • A direct link back to the specific alert in Netdata Cloud for immediate, deep-dive analysis with per-second metrics.

Your on-call engineer is now working from a formal, tracked incident that already contains the essential information they need to begin their investigation.

Get Started Today

The ServiceNow integration is available today for all users on our Business plan and during the 14-day free trial.

By automating the bridge between detection and formal response, you can free up your engineers to do what they do best: solve complex problems and build more reliable systems.

Read the documentation to get started →