Experience tells us SnowMirror is usually not part of the first ServiceNow implementation projects. The need to mirror ServiceNow data into customer’s premises usually comes up during the project or even more often after the tool is in production environment. Then someone finally realizes the data that used to be available from the old service desk tool is now unavailable for a reporting or analytics tool or that it is very hard to load data into a data mart. But what to do now? There is no budget planned for a SnowMirror agent. Where to install it? How to find a budget? The answer might be surprising – a MID server.
The solution is very simple, cheap and straightforward. SnowMirror requirements are not very complicated:
- Server to install SnowMirror application (i.e. agent). Windows or Linux
- Database to store mirrored data (e.g. MySQL, Oracle)
In many organizations it is more complicated and more expensive to get a server or a virtual server to run the agent than to get a database instance. But the agent requires just a simple box with maximum 2 GB of memory and a couple of MB of a hard drive. The application itself is not resource-intensive. So if the project has a MID server which is usually planned and budgeted it is possible to install SnowMirror on the same server as the MID server. Both agents do not require whole server resources so they can easily run on the same machine.
The database is usually easier to obtain for some unknown reasons. But if the database is a problem as well a MySQL database server can run on the MID server machine too. The database is a bit more resource-intensive but if the amount of synchronized data is not huge it should work without any issues.
