Share the Wealth: ITOM & Service Mapping in ServiceNow
Updated: Feb 1, 2021
In this week’s Share the Wealth video, Mike Desmond of Pharicode gives an overview and demonstration of ITOM & Service Mapping in ServiceNow.
What is ITOM Visibility?
ITOM Visibility is a general nomenclature for service mapping discovery and event management. The overview will cover ITOM Visibility Vision, How We Deliver, Use Cases, Persona, and Customer Examples.
Your Business-Aware Ops Platform
Customers need to understand what is running in their environment. Visibility provides an authoritative understanding of your business services and their dependencies. Tools for monitoring infrastructure and determining what has been impacted in the environment brings the following into play: visibility, service mapping, discovery, and event management.
Deliver Real-Time Visibility into Enterprise Infrastructure & Services
Desmond explores delivering real-time visibility into enterprise infrastructure and services. Tools, event sources, and third-party data sets including DevOps, Application Performance Tools, Event Sources, Discovery Data Sources, Infrastructure, APIs, and Cloud Services are put into the configuration management database (CMDB). Desmond poses the question, “We have all this data — how do we actually use it or apply it and contextualize it and make it useful?” The goal is to make the data beneficial to your business.
Leverage Business-Aware Views to Drive Better Decisions Across IT and the Business
The next step includes leveraging business-aware views to drive better decisions across IT and the business. The Business-Aware Data Layer consists of Application Portfolio Management, Service Catalog, Government, Risk and Compliance, IT Service Management, Service Portfolio Management, IT Financial Management, Asset Management, and Security Operations. The point of this is to help make more intelligent decisions based on the information you are getting about your infrastructure. This will allow the user to gain the following advantages: drive decisions with a business-aware lens, eliminate blind spots with service dependency views, understand and analyze business impact, and improve root cause analysis.
Ensure Data Integrity and Configuration Consistency Across Your Operations and Estate
Demond explores ensuring data integrity and configuration consistency across your operations and estate. The key takeaways include continuously optimized view of services, real-time management to desired state, detect and remediate service drift, and leverage benchmarking to improve accuracy of your services over time. It is important to refresh your CMDB as rapidly as possible using Discovery Service Mapping to determine how your business infrastructure and end-user applications have been impacted if an event does occur.
Establish Visibility Across your Entire Operations Estate
The end goal is to establish visibility across your entire operation estate. Within and across infrastructure stocks, data sources, event sources, APIs and cloud services, application performance tools, and software licenses form a service map. The outcomes are to understand the impact of making a change, maintain compliance and approach audits with confidence, and obtain near real-time visibility into the true operational state of business services.
Dependency Mapping vs Service Mapping
Desmond explains the difference between dependency mapping and service mapping. Dependency mapping essentially means that the server has processes and applications running on it. Service mapping is more of a laser-focused view that only cares about a specific service running on that specific server. Demond continues with a demonstration on service mapping and the discovery process in ServiceNow.
Interested in working with experts like Mike? Reach out to our team. We would love to learn more about your ServiceNow challenges and how we can help your organization build better solutions.