Before going through the Integration of Genie with SailPoint IdentityIQ, let us understand what a ticket and a ticketing system is.

What is a ticket?

A Ticket is a special record that represents an incident, request or event that requires action from the IT department. It contains the necessary details of the incident, request or event.

A ticketing system is a software platform designed to manage and track customer support requests. It streamlines the process of resolving customer issues, making it easier for businesses to provide fast and effective support.

Benefits of embracing a ticketing system in your organization:

• Control High Volume of Requests from a Centralized Place – Organizations can track and manage inbound support requests with the help of a good ticketing system. The solution can be used by executives to manage support cases more efficiently while still attending to all client issues.
• Combine interactions into one thread – Your team can use ticketing system to combine customer-related conversations into a single thread when offering customer care to clients via a variety of channels.
• Process automation and workload management – Ticketing systems provide several potentials for automation. As an illustration, the software gathers assistance requests from several sources before automating the creation of tickets. Regardless of the help channel clients select, tickets are automatically created whenever they submit requests.
• Adequate team collaboration – Ticketing systems provide a platform to the customer service representatives to collaborate among themselves in assigning tickets to senior associates in terms of P0 escalations.

About Genie:

Genie is a ticketing tool, in which there are different types of tickets such as Work Order tickets, Incident tickets, etc. SailPoint handles creation of below tickets in Genie from SailPoint.

1. Onboarding ticket
2. Exit or Off-boarding ticket
3. Provision failure ticket

Among the above tickets, Onboarding and Off-boarding tickets are Work Order tickets and Provision failure ticket is an Incident ticket.

Integration with SailPoint IdentityIQ:

Genie is integrated with SailPoint using REST APIs.

Below is the high-level architecture of Genie – SailPoint Integration

Now, let us have a look at the APIs used in the Integration process. Below is the list of APIs used for creating tickets and getting specific ticket details:

1. Generate Authentication key: We are using this API to generate an Authentication key. Here, the generated Authentication key expires for every few minutes.
2. Creating Work Order ticket: We are using this API to create a Work Order ticket in Genie.
3. Get specific Work Order ticket: We are using this API to Get a specific Work Order ticket details. In other words, it is used to Retrieve the Work Order ID of the submitted request.
4. Creating Incident ticket: We are using this API to create a Work Order ticket in Genie.
5. Get specific Incident ticket: We are using this API to Get a specific Incident ticket details. In other words, it is used to Retrieve the Incident number of the submitted request.

Prerequisites for integrating Genie with SailPoint:

Following are the prerequisites that are essential for integration of Genie with SailPoint IdentityIQ

1. Genie API details for creating tickets
2. Base URL and Authentication details of the APIs
3. Access to Genie Test Instance
4. Database table to store the ticket details
5. Connection details of the Database

Now, let us discuss the use cases involved in the integration process.

Use Cases

1. Onboarding Ticket Creation:

An Onboarding Work order ticket will be created in Genie from SailPoint when a new joiner joins the organization and his/her account is created in Truth Source and Active Directory applications.

The ticket contains details of the New Joiner such as Start Date, First Name, Last Name, Employee ID, Employment Type, AD ID, Domain ID, Contact Information, etc.

Success case:

Once the ticket gets created in Genie successfully, the details of the created ticket such as    Work Order ID, Creation Date, Request ID and ticket summary will be added to the database table.

Failure case:

If the ticket creation fails for some reason, then an Email notification containing the New Joiner’s details, will be triggered to the respective stakeholders.

1. Exit or Off-boarding Ticket Creation

An Exit or Off-boarding Work order ticket will be created in Genie when HR assigns the Last working date of the user in Truth source and that Last working date is 7 days away from today’s date.

The ticket contains details of the End dated user such as Last Working Date, First Name, Last Name, Employee ID, Employment Type, AD ID, Domain ID, Contact Information, etc.

Success case:
Once the ticket gets created in Genie successfully, the details of the created ticket such as Work Order ID, Creation Date, Request ID and ticket summary will be added to the database table.
 
Failure case:
If the ticket creation fails for some reason, then an Email notification with the End Dated user’s details, will be triggered to the respective stakeholders specifying.

1. Provisioning Failure (Incident Ticket)

A Provisioning Failure (Incident) ticket per application will be created if the provisioning operations failed in SailPoint in last 24 hours. In this use case, applications under consideration are Active Directory, G-Suite and OpenLDAP and operations under consideration are Create, Enable, Disable and Delete.

For example, if the Disable operation failed in Active Directory for an account, then a ticket (which will be of Incident type) will be created in Genie containing the details such as Type of operation failed and Display Name, Employee ID, email, sAMAccountName, userPrincipalName, distinguishedName, etc details of the account.

Success case:

Once the ticket gets created in Genie successfully, the details of the created ticket such as Incident Number, Creation Date, Request ID and ticket summary will be added to the database table.

Failure case:

If the ticket creation fails for some reason, then an Email notification will be triggered to the respective stakeholders specifying Type of operation failed, Application name in which Provisioning failed and Display Name, Employee ID, email, etc. details of the account.

Now, let us understand the advantages of integrating a ticketing system with SailPoint IdentityIQ when compared with a traditional ITSM.

Advantages of Integrating Genie with SailPoint IdentityIQ:

1. In this integration, we have automated the creation of onboarding tickets for New Joiners. Whereas in traditional ITSM’s, the ticket should be created manually by the end user.
2. While creating tickets in Genie, SailPoint uses the data coming from Truth Source which will be updated by the HR team. Whereas in traditional ITSM’s, there is every chance that end user does not give the mandatory details required by IT team to perform necessary action on that ticket or the end user mistakenly may also enter incorrect details. So, IT team might need to contact the HR team or the end user, which is a time-consuming process.
3. In this integration, we will be using the details of the user as per the Truth Source application while creating the ticket. So, the IT team may not wait for the communication from the concerned team.
4. Whereas in traditional ITSM’s, when the ticket is created, the IT team should get certain required details from the concerned team manually. The Exit ticket will be created automatically when the end-dated user is one week away from the Last Working date, which gives the IT team ample amount of time to take necessary actions such as collection of assets and disabling of access.
5. In this integration, we are storing the ticket details such as Work Order ID, Incident Number, Creation Date, Request ID and Summary in the database table for all the tickets created from SailPoint. So, we can use this table’s data for auditing purposes which ensures centralized governance.
6. The Incident tickets are created every day (one ticket per application) from SailPoint in Genie for applications such as Active Directory, G-Suite and OpenLDAP and for operations such as Create, Enable, Disable and Delete, if the provisioning fails in these applications. The point to be noted here is, if in an application, no provisioning operations failed for that day, then no ticket will be created for that application for the particular day. But, there is every chance that, one ticket per application will be created where each ticket contains the information of all the accounts for which Provisioning failed. Using SailPoint, this is one of the critical advantages of integrating genie with SailPoint IIQ. Whereas in traditional ITSM’s, this needs to be done manually, which will be a tedious task to do.

The detailed discussion of APIs, use cases and integration approach is discussed in the following video:

Now, let us a have a demo on integration of Genie with SailPoint IdentityIQ in the following video: