External Ticketing System Integration by using Symantec Workflow

Products

• Control Compliance Suite Windows

Issue/Introduction

A mechanism is required to integrate the compliance assessment capabilities of Control Compliance Suite Standards Manager module with the automated ticketing capabilities of any external IT Management Service (ITSM) tool.

Resolution

The integration mechanism, which is introduced already in Control Compliance Suite 12.5, is enhanced in this feature release. With this enhancement, you can achieve the following:

• Enable automatic creation and monitoring of remediation tickets in any external ticketing system and view the external ticket number in the Remediation  workspace on the Control Compliance Suite console
• Automatically poll for and update ticket status in Control Compliance Suite
• Automatically reverify remediated issues in Control Compliance Suite after external ticket is resolved

We have created a sample project template in Symantec Workflow for integration with Jira ITSM tool. We have defined an end-to-end closed-loop remediation workflow in this project. After you deploy this project template, it runs as an IIS-hosted secure web service.  The service communicates with Control Compliance Suite by using REST APIs to fetch evaluation results of a compliance scan. It also communicates with the external ITSM solution to create tickets automatically.
The external ticketing system integration workflow involves the steps as displayed in the following diagram:

The Symantec Workflow project template requires some initial configuration to suit your environment. The configuration includes specifying external ticketing system URL and authentication credentials and mapping the data schema for the corresponding tickets in Control Compliance Suite and the external system. This is a one-time configuration unless the configuration details of the external system change.

You can use this Workflow template for integration of Control Compliance Suite with any ITSM solution that supports REST API-based access and allows authentication based on credentials, for example, Atlassian JIRA, BMC Remedy, and Service Now, among others.

If you have advanced knowledge of the Symantec Workflow Engine, you can customize the template leveraging other available workflow components and modules. You may have to add or delete a component, change the linking of the components, or in some cases, even modify the C# code written for a component. The current solution serves as a reusable reference to enable integration and to promote further automation and workflow around Control Compliance Suite.

The release package is available in the Related Attachments section of this article. It is a zipped folder. Unzip the contents of the folder at a known location on your computer and start using the project template files.

To start using this feature, you must complete the following prerequisites:

Prerequisites:

• QF 10002

A new signing certificate is used for all Control Compliance Suite files signed after March 03, 2019. The updated ‘Symantec.CSM.AssemblyVerifier.dll’ file in this QF contains the updated CCS certificate information necessary to validate the certificate for newly released files. Click the QF number to view the page on which the QF package is available.

• QF 10003

The infrastructure updates that are required for the integration feature are available in this QF. The .zip package of this QF is available in the in the Support Files folder in the release package, which is available in the Related Attachments section. The steps to apply the QF are mentioned in the QF readme document, which is available in the QF .zip package.

The release package of this feature also contains the External Ticketing System Integration Using Symantec Workflow.pdf document. This document explains the installation and configuration details about the External Ticketing System Integration feature. We recommend that you read this document before you install and configure the project template files.