How CDW manages AWS support cases for multiple AWS managed services (AMS) Accelerate accounts

CDW is an AWS Advanced Tier partner with six partner programs and 50+ AWS Customer launches. Furthermore, it has partnered with AWS Managed Services (AMS) to provide a competitive advantage that further propels the quality and delivery of end-to-end IT solutions. CDW Cloud Managed Services powered by AMS helps you deploy, deliver, and manage applications in AWS, thereby freeing up your staff to focus on activities that drive business value. In this blog you will learn how CDW is managing its customer’s AMS incidents and service requests using AWS Support.

AMS Accelerate provides operational services to customers to manage AWS infrastructure. AMS uses native AWS services along with experienced AWS engineers to provide infrastructure security, monitoring, incident management, and other infrastructure services. AMS proactively monitors resources to detect issues and creates an incident in the AWS Support. Moreover, AMS customers can create incidents along with service requests. AMS provides incident management and resolution for proactively detected and customer reported issues.

As an AMS partner, CDW manages the AMS support incidents and service requests on behalf of their customers. This requires authenticating into each customer’s account and manually managing the AMS cases from customer’s AWS support console. This is time consuming and creates a security risk. This also requires managing the customer credentials centrally or have federated access into the customer’s AWS Accounts. CDW needed a way to create and manage their customer’s AWS support cases in a centralized tool, without having to switch between customers and their AWS accounts.

How CDW achieved this and how you can manage multiple AMS accounts – Solution overview

CDW wanted to utilize a central IT Service Management (ITSM) tool to manage support cases across all of the customers’ AMS AWS accounts. The solution was to use their ServiceNow tool to integrate with AWS Support. This enabled their engineers to create and manage their customer support cases in ServiceNow itself. This was crucial to meet their following use cases:

Create an AMS Support incident or service request in AWS support console using ServiceNow Incident
Communicate with AMS support engineers through comments on the ServiceNow Incident
Sync AMS Support incidents created on the AWS Support console as ServiceNow Incidents
Resolve and reopen AMS incidents and service requests using the respective ServiceNow Incidents
Near real-time bidirectional sync of support cases

Instead of developing a custom ServiceNow solution, CDW utilized AWS Service Management Connector (SMC) for ServiceNow.

SMC enables customers to provision, manage, and operate native AWS resources and capabilities in familiar ITSM tooling, such as ServiceNow and Atlassian. For ServiceNow customers, SMC offers a scoped application that’s available to install from the ServiceNow store. CDW is utilizing SMC connector to integrate AWS Support Center to ServiceNow. This provides CDW engineers a bi-directional mechanism for all their use cases. They can create, view, modify, and resolve AMS incidents and support requests in ServiceNow for multiple AMS customer accounts

Technical overview

SMC utilizes an Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) queue to poll updates to AWS support incidents and service requests. SMC uses AWS support endpoint API to create new incidents and updates to existing incidents made in ServiceNow.

As part of the setup of AWS services, an Amazon EventBridge rule is setup to detect changes to AWS support cases and push these to an Amazon SQS queue. In addition, SMC requires an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user and role creations in each AWS account with a) permissions for Amazon SQS queue and b) to create/update AWS support incidents and service requests.

SMC uses pre-configured IAM user to update AWS Support and a SQS queue to receive changes from AWS support

Figure 1. Technical Overview – SMC bi-directional synchronization with AWS Support

Getting started

Before you get started, verify the required permissions in AWS accounts to create users/roles and resource. And permissions to install plugins and applications in the ServiceNow instance.

AWS Configuration:

Follow Baseline Permissions to create AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) users in each AWS account. Note the access key and secret access key for each user.
Follow the Configure AWS section for AWS support to create an Amazon SQS queue and an EventBridge event pattern to point to the Amazon SQS queue.

ServiceNow Configuration :

Follow Configure core ServiceNow components section to install the required plugins and SMC application.

Finally, connect all of the AWS accounts and regions following Configure AWS accounts to synchronize in the Connector.

Configuring the AWS account for synchronization screen requires providing the access keys of the AWS users and selecting AWS services for integration

Figure 2. Configure accounts for synchronization

Validating integration for AMS incidents and service requests

AWS accounts configured for synchronization

Select the AWS accounts from the navigation panel:

AWS Accounts are under the Setup section of SMC

Figure 3 ServiceNow AWS account selection

Verify the Accounts configured for synchronization:

AWS Accounts configured in ServiceNow are listed along with account number and user keys

Figure 4 Accounts for synchronization

View/create/modify/resolve AMS incidents

In the ServiceNow navigation pane, incidents are listed under AWS Support within the SMC. Both AMS accelerate incidents and service requests are included in the same ServiceNow Incident pane. Follow Validating AWS Support in ServiceNow for instructions.

To report an incident for AMS Accelerate, select AWS Service – AMS Operations – Report Incident
To create an AMS Accelerate service request, select AWS Service – AMS Operations – Service Request

Conclusion

You’ve learned how CDW used ServiceNow and SMC to manage incident and service requests for their AMS customers’ accounts. With this solution they avoid authenticating into each customer’s account and manually managing AMS incidents and support requests in AWS Support. Customers with numerous accounts can also use this solution to manage their AWS support cases from ServiceNow.

Moreover, customers can use the SMC connector to integrate ServiceNow with other AWS services, such as AWS Service Catalog, AWS Config, AWS Systems Manager, AWS Health, and AWS Security Hub. Explore SMC Connector documentation to get started.

Enabling AWS Support with ServiceNow – Short Video.

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