I have a really long commute, and the last thing I need is to be
surprised by car trouble. Thankfully, cars nowadays monitor just
about everything bumper-to-bumper, warning us in advance before
minor issues become major problems. Auto mechanics use diagnostics
to pinpoint the exact component that needs attention. That’s the
kind of real-time monitoring and predictive intelligence ServiceNow®
IT Operations Management brings to the enterprise—and our own use is
a great example.
For years, ServiceNow has used IT
Service Management and IT
Operations Management to dramatically improve the quality of
our shared infrastructure services, and we’ve added capabilities as
the solutions have evolved. Here’s a look at how we use ITOM to stop
service outages before they start.
It all starts by gaining
real-time visibility into our enterprise infrastructure and
services. We do this using Event Management, which seamlessly
integrates with our service-aware CMDB and ITSM processes, and
aggregates inputs from third-party monitoring solutions such as
Splunk, SolarWinds, and SAP Solution Manager.
When events
come in, they’re analyzed for duplicates or correlations,
dramatically reducing “noise” and improving the quality of incidents
coming into our Services Reliability Team (SRT). ITOM also
automatically prioritizes incidents and intelligently assigns them
to the right resource the first time.
The Event Management
dashboard (see screen shot) is the “single pane of glass” that shows
the health of all business services in our environment. The boxes
change color based on the status, and we can get a closer look by
clicking on any box to bring up the service map.
From there, we use Service
Mapping for a visual representation of the relationships between
services, applications, and devices (see diagram). This eliminates
blind spots and lets us pinpoint the problem area. The service map
shows the details we need to identify and fix the root cause of an
issue. In this instance, the problem was related to a memory issue
on the database server for SAP HANA.
We are living proof of the
measurable benefits ServiceNow ITOM delivers, more consistently and
significantly than reactive solutions that can’t respond fast enough
to changing business demands. With it, we’ve achieved:
- 98% reduction in “noise” coming into our SRT queue by
correlating and prioritizing only the most important events into
actionable tickets
- 9,600 hours saved annually through
automated alert management
- 67% reduction in P1 and P2
incidents via Event Management and process improvements
- $780,000 in cost avoidance each year by eliminating manual
work
ITOM also led to demonstrable results in these
strategic areas:
-
Increased velocity – By consolidating 36,000 events into
only 529 incidents, and then prioritizing and routing them to the
right SRT resource, ITOM eliminated the time-consuming,
back-and-forth communications among teams. This accelerated our
time to resolution and improved service availability to our
business groups, partners, and customers.
-
Actionable insight – With the Event Management dashboard,
our system admins get instant visibility into the health of our
environment and can respond quickly to alerts. And with Service
Mapping we can quickly pinpoint the device with the issue and
address the root cause. The result? We eliminated outages and
reduced the mean time to repair through quick identification of
fault domains.
-
Improved experience – Our system administrators no longer
waste valuable time on duplicate or false alerts. When issues
arise, the information we need is at our fingertips, saving us the
time and trouble of monitoring multiple IT managers can rest
easier, knowing their teams have the insight they need to do their
jobs. And end users benefit from the greater uptime that
ServiceNow ITOM provides. It’s a win, win.
Technology is always evolving, and so is ServiceNow ITOM.
Someday, service outages will be a thing of the past—and by
continuing to enhance ITOM with machine intelligence and other
advancements, we’re confident that day will come sooner rather than
later.
To learn more about ITOM.
Thanks for taking the time to ready
this blog. I look forward to sharing more Now on Now stories
from our digital transformation journey!
Regards,
Chris
