Interfaces, APIs, microservices, etc. and integrations are crucial parts of the IT fabric. Understanding and cataloging your Interfaces, Integrations and how they interact with your Business Applications is critical.

Digital Integration Management (DIM) was introduced in 2023 as a Store release to help address this need in Application Portfolio Management.

On April 18 2024, we hosted a video workshop on this subject. Please follow the link below to the recording.

Strategies for APM's Digital Integration Management

For some background in Digital Integration Management, we recommend you review Bruno De Graeve’s articles,

which provided some insights into solutions developed prior to the release of APM’s Digital Integration Management and the origins of APM's Digital Integration Management (DIM).

Why Digital Interface / Integration Management in APM?

• Microservices, webservices, integrations are lifeblood between modern Enterprise Systems. Companies must have a practice of cataloging these APIs, web service and integrations utilizing them.​
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• Often, companies are "documenting" in design doc in development doc management or SharePoint etc. These source are very poor choices for enabling analytics and true management of your APIs.​
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• ServiceNow's APM allows you to build a formal, consistent, and analyzable catalog of these crucial enterprise assets.
• DIM captures the Design level rather than operation (see the CMDB API classes for operational) so the higher-level, non-discoverable metadata is captured. This can support use cases such as rationalization, subscriber ordering and so forth.

Key Capabilities

Digital Integration Management can be divided into two areas/concepts: Interfaces and Integrations.

Digital Interfaces are used to represent APIs, microservices, webservice endpoints even old school systems that create a csv file and post it on a file share. Any of these are generically identified as Digital Interfaces.

The reasoning behind providing this functionality is that while it is important to discover and model the operational facets of APIs and microservices in the CMDB, just having the “operational” aspects is not enough. What about architectural documentation and process? These sorts of information are not discoverable yet are crucial to fully document the APIs and service oriented architecture upon which your enterprise functions.

Digital interface provides the following attributes and related items to allow users to define the purpose, ownership, architectural, authentication and functional detail of the Interface.

Name	Version
Number	Life cycle stage
Providing Business Application	Life cycle stage status
Interface type: Open, Partner, Internal	Model ID: Product Model of the product representing the API/microservice for Agile/SAFe Epics, Features or Stories
Parent: DIM allows you to define a hierarchy of APIs	Description
Owners
Business Owner	Supported by
IT Owner	Support Group
Functional
Protocol: REST, SOAP, FTP, HTTP etc.	Message Format: JSON, XML, etc.
Authentication
Authentication Type: Basic Auth, Open ID Connect, Certificate, etc.	Authorization Type: OAuth 2.0 token, SAML Token, etc.
Activities
Work notes
Related Lists
Digital Integrations (Subscribers)
Digital Interfaces (children)
Architectural Artifacts

With these concepts, you may develop and manage a rich description of your APIs, microservice and other interfaces. The point is the here in the Design Domain, Digital Interface provides that detailed description while elsewhere in the CMDB API and Application Service classes are used to model the operational structure.

Of special note, the Providing Business Application is not required. You may choose to catalog your interfaces and the subscribing integrations though it is likely most if not all have a connection to one or more business applications. That said, API, microservices don't just exist by theirselves. thet exist to connet your enterprise syetms and it will be a much more complete model if you include the Provider/Subscriber Business Application and subscriber Interfaces.

Digital Integrations are used to represent the subscribers to those APIs, microservices, webservice endpoints that are modeled in the Digital Interfaces.

Digital Integration provides the following attributes and related items to allow users to define the purpose, ownership, architectural, authentication and functional detail of the Interface.

Name
Number	Version
Provider Digital Interface	Life cycle stage
Provider Business Application	Life cycle stage status
Subscriber Digital Interface	Business Unit
Type: Data Integration, Process Integration, User Interface Integration	Subtype: Foundation data, Configuration Items, Events, Reporting, Syslog
	Description
Owners
Business Owner	Supported by
IT Owner	Support Group
Functional
Data flow direction: Outgoing, Incoming, Bidirectional	Response: Synchronous, Asynchronous
Trigger: Manual, Scheduled, Process Driven, Event	Interaction Type: Guaranteed Message, Pub-Sub, Pull, Push
Interval: Interval is scheduled	Middleware: product used to build integration
Business Impact
Criticality: Low, Medium, High, Critical	Integrity: Low, Medium, High, Critical
Confidentiality: Low, Medium, High, Critical	Availability: Low, Medium, High, Critical
Activities
Work notes
Related Lists
Architectural Artifacts
Information Objects

APIs in the CMDB and CSDM Build Domain

You should be aware that APIs also have a representation in the CMDB (operational) with a set of CMDB classes release in the Vancouver timeframe, fall 2023. These classes allow for the representation of the actual operational elements and deployment of the API including Gateway and related configuration.

See the Community Article New Data Model in CMDB for APIs