Working inside the data center - introducing the MID server

The Management, Instrumentation, and Discovery (MID) server is designed to ease communication with external systems that sit inside a customer's data center. While ServiceNow can easily integrate with cloud-based systems without one, integrating with systems behind a firewall requires extra help.

The MID server is not a device, and does not run on the instance-it is installable Java software that runs on customer infrastructure. This provides the following capabilities:

• The MID server has direct communication with other systems, since it is in the customer's network. This is very useful for communicating via unencrypted protocols, such as JDBC.
• Scripts that run on the MID server have access to the filesystem and can include custom Java code in JAR packages.
• The MID server only initiates connections. It does not accept inbound communication and does not open any ports. This makes it more acceptable to security teams.
• It offloads work...