Every organization and business focuses on key strategies, some of them include:
- Time to market
- Agility
- Customer satisfaction
- Return on investment
Information technology is heavily involved in supporting these strategic goals, either directly or indirectly, providing the underlying IT Services with the required IT infrastructure. IT infrastructure includes network, servers, routers, switches, desktops, laptops, and much more. IT supports these infrastructure components enabling the business to achieve its goals. IT continuously supports the IT infrastructure and its components with a set of governance, processes, and tools, which is called IT Operations Management.
IT cares and feeds the business, and the business expects reliability of services provided by IT to support the underlying business services. A business cares and feeds the customers who expect satisfaction of the services offered to them without service disruption.
Unlike any other tools, it is important to understand the underlying relationship between IT, businesses, and customers. IT just providing the underlying infrastructure and associated components is not going to help; to effectively and efficiently support the business IT needs to understand how the infrastructure, components, and process are aligned and associated with the business services to understand the impact to the business with an associated incident, problem, event, or change that is arising out of an IT infrastructure component.
IT needs to have a consolidated and complete view of the dependency between the business and the customers, not compromising on the technology used, the process followed, the infrastructure components used, which includes the technology used. There needs to be a connected way for IT to understand the relations of these seamless technology components to be able to proactively stop the possible outages before they occur and handle a change in the environment.
On the other hand, a business expects service reliability to be able to support the business services to the customers. There is a huge financial impact of businesses not being able to provide the agreed service levels to their customers. So, there is always a pressure and dependence from the business to IT to provide a reliable service and it does not matter what technology or processes are used.
Customers, as always, expect satisfaction of the services provided by the business, at times these are adversely affected by service outages caused by the IT infrastructure. Customer satisfaction is also a key strategic goal for the business to be able to sustain in the competitive market. IT is also expected to be able to integrate with the customer infrastructure components to provide a holistic view of the IT infrastructure view to effectively support the business by proactively identifying and fixing the outages before they happen, reducing the number of outages and increasing the reliability of IT services delivered.
Most of the tools do not understand the context of the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) connecting the business services to the impacted IT infrastructure components to be able to effectively support the business and also IT to be able to justify the cost and impact of providing end to end service.
Most of the traditional tools perform certain aspects of ITOM functions, some partially and some support integration with the IT Service Management (ITSM) tool suite. The missing integration piece between the traditional tools and a full blown cloud solution platform is leaning to the SOA.
ServiceNow, a cloud based solution, has focused the lens of true SOA that brings together the ITOM suite providing and leveraging the native data and also connecting to the customer infrastructure to provide a holistic and end-to-end view of the IT Service at a given snapshot.
With ServiceNow IT has a complete view of the business service and technical dependencies in real time leveraging powerful individual capabilities, applications, and plugins within ServiceNow ITOM.
ServiceNow ITOM comprises the ServiceNow application and plugins. Not all the applications and plug-ins come out-of-the-box, some of the plugins, and applications have license restrictions that require separate licensing or subscriptions to be purchased. More detailed information is given in the subsequent chapters. The following are different components of plug-ins and applications and that make up ServiceNow IT Operations Management.
- Management, Instrumentation, and Discovery (MID) Server: The MID Server helps to establish communication and data movement between ServiceNow and the external corporate network and application
- Credentials: This is a platform that stores credentials including usernames, passwords, or certificates in an encrypted field on the credentials table that is leveraged by ServiceNow discovery
- Service mapping: Service mapping discovers and maps the relationships between IT components that comprise specific business services, even in dynamic, virtualized environments
- Dependency views: Dependency views graphically display an infrastructure view with relationships of configuration items and the underlying business services
- Event management: Event management provides a holistic view of all the events that are triggered from various event monitoring tools
- Orchestration: Orchestration helps in automating IT and business processes for operations management
- Discovery: Works with MID Server and explores the IT infrastructure environment to discover the configuration items and populating the Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
- Cloud management: Helps to easily manage third-party cloud providers, which include AWS, Microsoft Azure, and VMware clouds
