A growing number of companies are embracing ServiceNow across their enterprise today. As they continue integrating ServiceNow into their day-to-day operations, they are beginning to grasp the true value of the platform. There’s a paradigm shift we’re seeing with these companies and the realization of ServiceNow as more than just an IT Service Management (ITSM) tool; rather, they are increasingly viewing it as a complete platform that facilitates the consolidation of various Enterprise systems and services into a single, robust “system of engagement” with capabilities spanning various domains of the larger company.
As this trend of expanding ServiceNow across multiple business segments within a company gathers pace, a few questions emerge:
How do we bridge the gap between our business users and the multitude of technical organizations supporting mission critical business services?
- How can we quickly assess the impact when a specific host or group of hosts are disrupted within a business service?
- How can we leverage automation to expedite the Incident Management life cycle and help reduce Mean-Time-To-Repair (MTTR) and increase overall customer satisfaction?
ServiceNow addresses these concerns seamlessly with their IT Operations Management (ITOM) suite; primarily with the synergies between Service Mapping, Event Management, and Orchestration. You can download our FREE eBook on ITOM here.
Bridging the Gap with Live, Dynamic Business Service Maps and Event Management
Service Mapping provides a “top down” discovery approach in which it takes an entry point for a business service, generally a URL, and discovers all of the network devices, servers, and databases in order to compile a dynamic Business Service Map (BSM). This is revolutionary, because unlike traditional “horizontal” discovery solutions that scan multiple IP ranges and retrieve all the devices found on the network, Service Mapping is a targeted approach that maps out only the devices that pertain to a specified business service, by reading configuration files for the deployed application.
By using these dynamic Business Service Maps, technical support organizations can quickly process the upstream and downstream relationship and evaluate the overall impact of an incident or potential impact caused by failed maintenance activities. Furthermore, by integrating your existing monitoring tools with ServiceNow’s Event Management application, we’re able to make the maps ‘live’ by consuming the alerts in ServiceNow and binding them to the CI’s on the Business Service Maps. Network Operations Centers (NOCs), or any support stakeholders are then able to receive alerts directly on the business service maps, and quickly determine which business users are impacted and how to properly triage the incident to downstream support teams.
Orchestration: Taking Action
Gone are the days where the NOC is bombarded with meaningless alerts which are often left orphaned for ages, only to be mass closed at a later date. Thanks to Service Mapping we have these dynamic maps, and we have Event Management correlating alerts received to CI’s on the maps to make them ‘live’. So, how do you take action?
ServiceNow provides a robust workflow engine with the Orchestration. We can leverage Orchestration to incorporate automation in the Event and Incident Management processes. After receiving an alert, Orchestration workflows can be triggered to notify necessary stakeholders, take action on the impacted node(s) to auto-remediate the alert, and finally update the incident.
Effectively implementing the ITOM “trinity” of Service Mapping, Event Management and Orchestration along with a robust, mature CMDB can drastically improve an organization’s ability to be service aware and truly gain service insight while tremendously improving operational efficiencies and reducing overall cost of support.
About Saadi Tahmid
ProV is a premium global ServiceNow integrations and implementations partner that provides specialized ServiceNow services. Saadi joined ProV in January 2018 and has over 11 years of consolidated experience in global IT operations, product management, business process improvements, and ServiceNow implementations, specializing in ITOM strategic planning.
As the Global Head for ServiceNow ITOM at ProV, Saadi helps companies progress in their Operational Transformation leveraging ServiceNow ITOM to drive automation, reduce support costs, and improve CMDB governance and maturity.. ProV’s robust ITOM tools and processes help bridge the gap between traditional IT and new agile business initiatives.
To learn more about how ProV can help your organization gain more service insight, leave a comment below or contact us today. You can also reach Saadi directly on LinkedIn here.
