Consolidate Your Applications and Introduce Automation with Event Management & Orchestration from ServiceNow

It takes a village to support IT as it helps drive organizational success – a village of applications. IT relies on apps to support daily operations, reduce management overhead and improve quality ofapps-keys-shows-web-application-or-applications_GJsHIVv_ service for end-users. The right tools can strengthen IT’s ability to deliver services reliably and efficiently.  Not all tools are created equal, however.  Sometimes, applications designed to make life easier can have the opposite effect.

Consider monitoring tools and apps. They’re tasked with giving IT pros the insight they need to maintain the availability and performance of mission-critical services. So, in the event that a server goes down, IT will know about it right away and can take action before any long term damage is done.

That’s the bright side. On the other hand, monitoring apps can generate a tremendous amount of white noise. Alerts may need to be manually validated to weed out duplicates, false alarms, etc. Then they must be prioritized to ensure the most pressing issues are getting immediate attention. IT employees already don’t have much wiggle room in their daily schedules and adding in these new responsibilities only exacerbates that point.

The solution? IT Operations Management (ITOM) from ServiceNow. ITOM builds on standard ServiceNow deployments, creating a service-focused, agile and highly-available environment. There are two ITOM offerings that, when paired together, excel at helping IT consolidate app management and improve operational efficiency. Those solutions are Event Management and Orchestration. Let’s take a closer look at each one and the roles they play.

Event Management

Most organizations rely on apps from multiple vendors. These apps don’t always play well together. This can cause information to become segregated, making it harder for IT team members to solve problems and mitigate future issues.

Here’s how it helps: Event Management consolidates all of an organization’s disparate, third party monitoring tools into a single pane of glass. It can be configured to filter alerts to allow only qualified alerts to reach the IT desk. These are then displayed on a consolidated dashboard, which puts all of the monitoring info, regardless of source, in one spot. The dashboard can increase IT’s understanding of the total impact of events by mapping the connection to business services.

This solution also:

  • Automatically creates alerts and incidents to reduce time-consuming manual tasks and speed up time-to-resolution
  • Prioritizes issues so that those with the highest impact on the business will get moved to the top of IT’s to do list
  • Makes it a breeze to link existing monitoring apps to ServiceNow via a high throughput Rest API

Orchestration

Once the number of alerts has been reduced (thanks to Event Management), the next problem is ensuring the processes used to address the alerts are as efficient as possible. One way to do this? Automating response and remediation to some of the more common issues.

Here’s how it helps: Orchestration brings consistency to IT service delivery by automating the activities IT does regularly, standardizing offerings and consolidating tool sets. Imagine what IT could do with the time saved by taking tasks such as employee on-boarding and user administration off its plate? Perhaps best of all: Orchestration introduces self-service password resets into the mix, allowing users to solve their own password problems, jettisoning one of IT’s least favorite and most common duties.

This solution also:

  • Provides fast time-to-value with a library of already-created orchestration activities and ready-to-use apps
  • Grows with the enterprise due to its scalable structure
  • Ensures audit compliance with an event record which tracks Orchestration activities to create a history that can be followed during an audit

Experience the power of ITOM live

Now’s the perfect time to learn more about what these and other ITOM solutions from ServiceNow can do for your organization.

If you want to get the conversation started, we can always be reached at www.arrayasolutions.com/contact-us/ or through Twitter by sending your questions, comments and ideas to @ArrayaSolutions.

Arraya Insights