Best practices on setting up your MID Server - Support and Troubleshooting

Best practices on setting up your MID Server Description  Best practice on setting up your MID Server

Resources To get started with setting up your MID Server, review the following resources in order. These resources will provide step-by-step instructions on how to set up a MID Server on a local network resource. Video Tutorial: How to Set Up a MID Server

Best practice on setting up your MID Server A management, instrumentation, and discovery—or MID-Server, is a Java application that runs as a Windows service or UNIX daemon. The MID Server facilitates communication and movement of data between the ServiceNow platform and external applications, data sources, and services. To set up your MID Server:

Download the appropriate install files from your ServiceNow instance onto the computer that hosts the MID Server. Extract the download after it completes. The agent folder contains all the files needed for the MID Server, including some that you must modify before starting the service. Create a new folder at the root level of the C drive on the host. Copy the agent folder into this folder, so that you can modify the copied files and preserve the original MID Server install files. Rename the folder after the copying completes. After you start the MID Server service, you can’t rename the agent folder without removing the service and re-installing it. Open the config file, which is an XML document, in text editor. In the required parameters section, replace the value that you need to modify with the name of the ServiceNow instance that the MID Server connects to. Set up a user name and password on your ServiceNow instance that the MID Server can use to log in. Back in your instance, add a new user to the User table. Assign the mid_server role to allow proper access. Best practice is to assign the mid_server role—instead of admin —for proper tracking of activities and limited access to the instance. The mid_server role inherits all other required roles. Enter the MID Server user name and password in the config file. The encrypt parameter is set to true by default. Your password is encrypted when you save the file. If you do not want to encrypt your password, change this value to false . Establish the MID Server name, which shows up in the MID Servers list. It is best to use a consistent naming convention for all MID Server names. For example, include the name of the host machine and the type of ServiceNow instance the MID Server connects to, such as Prod1, Dev1, and so forth. Configure optional parameters. It is best to leave threads.max set to the default value provided in the config file. Increasing this value allows the MID Server service to consume more system resources, which may degrade performance. If you plan to use a proxy for your MID Server to connect to your ServiceNow instance, this is where you provide the pertinent information. Some proxies require a host name and port, while others require a username and password. Check the requirements for your system before completing this section. Again, encryption is set to true by default to protect the password. If you want to use a proxy for no other purpose than to download upgrades, do not enter any information in the option parameters. Instead, enter it in the downloading upgrades section. If you want upgrades to go through a different proxy than the one used to connect to your ServiceNow instance, fill in both sections. Note : To receive downloads from the install server, make sure the port is open for HTTP protocol.

You may want to modify the Java Service Wrapper, or JSW, to give your MID Server service a unique name. If only one MID Server is installed on the host, it is not necessary to modify the Java Service Wrapper.

The wrapper.conf file contains the default configuration for the MID Server. Any configuration changes should be made to the wrapper-override .conf file. MID Server upgrades overwrite the content of the wrapper.conf file but do not modify the wrapper-override.conf file.

The default wrapper.name is snc_mid . Edit this file to give the MIDServer service a unique name. When you save this, you’re done configuring our MID Server, and ready to start it up. To start up the MID Server and verify that the service is running:

Open a command prompt as administrator. Even if you’re logged in as administrator, right-click Command Prompt and click Run as administrator to make sure you get the Administrator Command Prompt . Navigate to your MIDserver directory’s SNC_MIDServer_Prod1 folder. For Windows, these two batch files—start and stop—start and stop your MID Server service. In Linux, you would start and stop the MID Server by executing these shell script files. Also, on Linux, there is no service . Instead, everything is handled in the terminal. In Windows, there are other ways to start and stop the service, but ServiceNow recommends that you start it this way the first time because the console displays progress, and any installation or start errors would be noted here. Confirm that the MID Server has started by checking the services running on this machine. Service should be listed by the display name you entered in the wrapper-override.conf file. Status indicates that it has Started . The Properties General tab lists both the service name and display name from the wrapper-override.conf file. The Startup type should be Automatic, so that if the host computer restarts, the MID Server starts itself. On the Log On tab, specify the credentials used to run the MID Server on the host machine. Best practice is to use a specific account that has permission to read and write to the MID Server directories on the host. Select This account and enter the credentials here. Restart the service with the new credentials and verify that the MID Server is connected to your ServiceNow instance.