The Basics of IT Operations Management in ServiceNow
ITOM 101
Since diving deeper into cybersecurity (for the last two years), I've found myself increasingly drawn to IT Operations Management (ITOM) in ServiceNow.
Networking is the foundation of cybersecurity, and a basic understanding is crucial. Interestingly enough, this knowledge is also an excellent gateway to comprehending ITOM in ServiceNow. To further explore ITOM, it's paramount to have an understanding of networking protocols, which I love.
This is my first article in which I try to give a concise introduction to ITOM.
The WHY
To summarize the WHY behind ITOM this illustration does a good job:
Ultimately, an organization's priority should be: how to eliminate service outages to save costs while optimizing their services. The answer to this is ITOM.
I'm talking about ServiceNow ITOM, obviously.
Essentially, ITOM is about governing the health of an organization's IT infrastructure.
ITOM does this by providing several solutions/services that help organizations better enhance the understanding of how IT services are constructed and interconnected.
ITOM services
Having a good understanding of your IT infrastructure and business services will in the long run enable you to optimize your expenditure around your IT assets. In other words, this will help you to save costs on your IT infrastructure and business services.
This illustration may conceptualize these services in more detail:
The aim of these services is to monitor the IT infrastructure and business services of an organization automatically by auto-populating the CMDB, triggering alerts through events, etc.
ITOM Solutions
So, what are these solutions?
As you can see in the image above (ITOM services), the solutions are the following:
- Discovery
- Service Mapping
- Event Management
- Cloud Management
- Orchestration
Just to clear any confusion, these are all modules within the ITOM application.
In this article, I will only cover the first three solutions.
But before diving deeper into these solutions I want to emphasize that ITOM is heavily dependent on the CMDB. It should be noted that CMDB is a Now Platform capability, NOT an ITOM product.
Since the CMDB is the foundation of all the SN modules/applications, it needs to be maintained correctly and consistently. However, ITOM in particular is the most dependent on the CMDB. This is because it has mechanisms in place where it constantly needs to monitor/track the IT assets that are saved in the CMDB.
Discovery
- The goal of the discovery app is to discover/explore the organization’s IT infrastructure in terms of logical, physical, and business services (i.e., facilities, virtual servers, network storage, apps, etc.).
- More specifically, discovery enables you to find dependencies between your IT infra.
Features of discovery
Discovery Process
But how does it work in practice? What do you concretely need to set up to discover your IT infra? What's the driving force behind Discovery?
The Mid Server is the driving force behind Discovery specifically and ITOM in general. It is the mediator between your SN instance and other third-party cloud providers (which are usually cloud provider networks). The Mid Server needs to be set up in a way that it pushes new info to SN periodically or every time it discovers a new service in the cloud provider network.
For that, the Mid Server uses special networking protocols to discover (new) devices/services. These protocols are: SNMP protocol, PowerShell, SSH, API, and CIM.
You may ask yourself:
Which clouds & Technologies does SN support to do the discovery of IT infra?
SN supports all well-known Cloud Providers who have either Public or Private data centers:
"In the age of cloud computing, ITOM extends its mastery to the cloud, ensuring that your cloud resources are optimally utilized, keeping costs in check, and services available 24/7." - tiagomacul
TLS Certificate Discovery & Management
One of the values of having a CMDB is to automatically discover SSL certificates and to update them before they expire:
Discovery Dashboards
Discovery dashboards can be extremely useful for visualizing the specifics of an org IT infra. Additionally, they can help orgs to make better decisions about their IT ifra.
This is what the Discovery Dashboards look like once the automated discovery is in place.
Dashboards show categories of discovered resources, including what's newly discovered and what's no longer present.
Service Mapping
Service Mapping is about defining the business services and understanding the service impact on the whole IT infra.
What are the business services that are going to be impacted whenever there is an issue such that the business downtown is increasing?
Important: If you don’t have a hierarchical/skeleton view in the place, then you will not be able to understand and identify which particular business services are been impacted. Consequently, this will have an impact on your finances and cost.
For example, a Windows VM goes down of a Banking app.
Which services are going to be impacted?
In other words, Service Mapping will quickly help you understand and identify the business services/processes that have been impacted when an issue occurs. So, you will be able to reduce the business downtown considerably.
Service Mapping Process
Dependency Mapping vs Service Mapping
- Discovery (dependency mapping) uses a horizontal approach to discover the IT landscape and dependent relationships. In other words, dependency mapping finds the up and down, left and right dependencies of the devices.
- Service Mapping uses a top-down or vertical approach to define the business services.
Event Management
Event management doesn’t monitor your devices. It’s an event collection item that runs with Machine Learning.
"Imagine a world where your organization's IT systems are finely tuned instruments, alerting you to potential issues before they become full-blown problems. This proactive approach is made possible by ITOM's Event Management, which keeps a watchful eye on the digital landscape and takes action at the first sign of trouble." - tiagomacul
Data Ingestion - Events / Metrics
Note: Best to dedicate a MID server cluster to OI
Event Management - Main Flows
As you can see, there are quite a few steps involved in the event management business flow.
Event Flow
This can be done by proactively identifying Service Issues; pinpointing disruptions; and automating remediation.
Provides a visual picture of business service health and monitors in near real-time
Other Helpful ITOM Tools
Business Service Health Dashboard
Operator Workspace
A more scalable and uniform operator experience.
This workspace comes with its own alert insights:
Summary
"So, in essence, IT Operations Management isn't just a set of practices and tools; it's the wizardry that transforms your IT into a well-oiled machine. It's the guardian of your organization's digital realm, ensuring that every bit and byte serves a purpose, and every operation is a step towards success." - tiagomacul
ITOM delivers:
- faster incidents resolution
- lower cost and complexity
- improve service availability
- holistic visibility
- ITSM integration
That's a wrap!
References:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiXAZ5SjX-I&t=268s&ab_channel=ITCanvass
- https://www.servicenow.com/community/itom-articles/itom-it-operations-management/ta-p/2319650
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