Five Ways to Get More Out of ServiceNow

If you are part of an enterprise, chances are you are relying on IT Service Management (ITSM) tools like ServiceNow to help manage your IT environment and resolve service issues when problems arise. You may even be integrating your monitoring solutions with your ITSM system for visibility and deeper insight into incident resolution.

But as the world of IT becomes increasingly more complex and the demands of the customer increase, organizations are requiring ITOps teams to move from reacting to working intelligently for the business. A huge part of this shift is about delighting customers, which means transforming the IT experience, quickly resolving complex issues end-to-end, and delivering high-performance business services. Enter Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps)—a unifying approach for IT transformation.

Today’s IT environments are so complex and change so often, it requires ITOps monitoring and ITSM platforms that complement each other bi-directionally in real time. That ensures the enterprise is operating from a consistent set of data, providing state and status updates, determining network health, and diagnosing incidents as they arise. It also means you have the information you need to repair problems quickly—and even automatically—when they arise.

You can achieve this level of performance by combining an AIOps solution like the ScienceLogic SL1 platform with the ServiceNow ITSM platform. On their own, these platforms improve monitoring and management processes, but together they can help you establish a new standard for ITOps and ITSM that maximizes your IT investments. Here are five ways how.

Accelerate Time-To-Value with Your ITSM tools. The clock doesn’t start counting down on your return on investment until the technology you’ve purchased is up and running as expected, or until that customer you’ve just acquired is fully on board and receiving the service you’ve promised. With SL1 working to discover all your configuration items, immediately start monitoring them, and then auto-populate your CMDB with clean data from your monitored environment, Day One is truly day one, and you can immediately begin to realize returns on your ServiceNow investment.

Achieve Real-Time CMDB Accuracy. Every decision made through your ITOps and ITSM platforms should be based on accurate, up-to-date, single-source information. That means breaking down operational siloes and, instead, creating a single operational data lake with a common language that feeds your CMDB in real time. When your CMDB is maintained that way, you can be assured of complete visibility and accuracy of your dynamic IT environment. Tight integration between SL1 and ServiceNow gives you that real-time, trusted perspective.

Automate and Enrich Incidents. Leveraging real-time CMDB data means you can automatically create and populate incidents with detailed diagnostic info captured when a problem occurs. On average, it takes 10-15 minutes to create an incident manually, and up to 90 minutes to route it to the right team. On top of that, 82% of incidents aren’t actionable (per Digital Enterprise Journal) because the incidents don’t have the right information in them. Incident enrichment allows you to automate the typical steps to troubleshoot a problem. Combined with automating the incident management process, you can accelerate—if not automate—your break/fix processes. That can translate to minimizing or avoiding costly downtime for your critical apps and services, and potentially millions of dollars lost associated with idle systems and dissatisfied customers. And automating your incident management process with ServiceNow automation provides the predictive maintenance, accelerated mean time to repair (MTTR), and more efficient and reliable IT operations that can mean millions of dollars saved.

Reduce Incident Noise. A major factor contributing to the inefficiency of your IT environment, and the staff that you rely on to keep it running, is the sheer volume of false incidents that lack context and correlation. When issues occur, if you don’t know what they are, what they are related to, you can waste a lot of time duplicating efforts trying to figure out what caused them and how to respond. If you knew that the incident was a symptom of a broader issue, that’s time that could have been used to solve the real problem. If an application or piece of hardware was taken down for scheduled maintenance, there’s no need to scramble the team. The one-two combination of SL1 and ServiceNow means you work on fewer, actionable incidents—enriched with information that gives you the insight required to make your best decisions, prioritize tasks, and resolve problems quickly.

Enhance Visibility of IT Resources. When IT Ops and ITSM teams don’t understand how your infrastructure maps to your business services, it’s difficult to prioritize critical incidents and manage IT change. Service visibility lets you see critical relationships between infrastructure, applications, and business services so you can find the causes of business service problems quickly and fix them fast. SL1 gives you that needed context by continuously mapping what resources belong to what applications and services in highly dynamic environments—and feeding them into your CMDB—so you can meet SLAs more consistently, prevent unintended consequences of IT change, and quickly prioritize IT issues.

Through these five ScienceLogic-ServiceNow advantages, you can drive more data and workflow automation across your IT ecosystem. Better yet, when you have real-time, trusted, contextual data, you can use that information to automate operational processes and incident response. So instead of spending hours creating, circulating, and responding to tickets manually, you can reallocate staff resources to perform higher level tasks that increase customer satisfaction and drive revenue for your business.

Results like these have been demonstrated in deployments, including one of the world’s largest e-commerce sites where downtime was estimated to cost approximately $100,000 per minute. But with the combination of ScienceLogic and ServiceNow, that company has realized productivity gains of 86% thanks to incident and process automation. In another case, a managed service provider deployed the ScienceLogic-ServiceNow tandem to facilitate rapid customer on-boarding, resulting in faster service delivery and faster time to value.

If you’re interested in getting more out of your ServiceNow investment, check out this informative webinar. It includes a demonstration of how ScienceLogic and ServiceNow operate better together, and more details of the two case studies mentioned above.