ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM): Gaining the 360° View to Control Your IT Universe

Today, organizations of all sizes rely on complex and interconnected IT infrastructure, making it challenging to proactively identify and solve the issues that can disrupt business operations. In this blog, we’ll introduce you to ServiceNow ITOM, a platform that helps you gain a 360-degree view of your IT infrastructure.

So, let’s get started with a simple overview of ServiceNow IT Operations Management.

What is ServiceNow ITOM?

ServiceNow ITOM is a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tool that manages technology-related operations, ensuring optimal performance aligns with business objectives.

It provides a holistic view of complete IT infrastructure and resources (computing, network, hardware, software, etc).

In simple terms, ServiceNow IT Operations Management is a strategic solution to keep the technology side of the business running smoothly, and issues can be proactively resolved so that the business can focus on its main tasks.

ServiceNow ITOM can be integrated with ServiceNow ITSM to help enterprises mature from reliant and reactive IT models to proactive, self-healing IT architectures.

ServiceNow IT Operations Management Functions

ServiceNow IT Operations Management is responsible for managing network infrastructure, help desk to server, and more. Here is the list of ServiceNow ITOM functions;

Physical and Virtual Servers

ITOM ServiceNow helps in managing both physical and virtual servers. It automatically discovers the servers employed in your IT infrastructure and creates configuration items (CIs) for each server. These CIs include the key information of servers such as hardware specifications, operating systems, and installed software.

It establishes the relationship between the virtual servers and their physical hosts. This relationship mapping makes it easy to determine their dependencies and impact on the organization.

ITOM continually monitors the various aspects of servers such as CPU usage, memory usage, disk space, and network performance.

Network Infrastructure Management

ITOM ServiceNow is responsible for overseeing the equipment responsible for internal and external communication. It ensures that the remote access networks are established effectively, enabling remote employees to connect securely.

The additional functions include firewall regulations, monitoring network security protocols, availability & performance management, and internal telephone system management.

Storage Systems Management

ITOM efficiently handles the organization’s data storage infrastructure by maintaining inventory storage devices such as SAN (Storage Area Network), NAS (Network Attached Storage), and DAS (Direct Attached Storage). This inventory allows ITOM leaders to track the available storage capacity, performance metrics, and possible bottlenecks.

The additional responsibility of ITOM includes capacity planning & optimization, storage provision & allocation, and performance monitoring & troubleshooting. It also includes storage security & compliance and lifecycle management.

Cloud Resources Management

ITOM provides a unified view of all the cloud resources (including, public, private, and hybrid) employed in your organization. ITOM managers can track and manage these resources from a single interface.

The additional responsibilities include provisioning & lifecycle management, cost visibility & optimization, multi-cloud governance, and more.

Containers and Microservices Management

ServiceNow ITOM discovers and maps container environments, including Docker containers, Kubernetes clusters, and microservices. It maintains a comprehensive view of containers and microservices in the Configuration Management Database (CMDB).

ITOM employs event management and metrics intelligence to track the container and microservices’ health.

What are the Benefits of ServiceNow ITOM?

ServiceNow ITOM groups the following capabilities into scalable packages to help your business manage the IT infrastructure. Here are the benefits of ServiceNow ITOM;

1. Holistic View

ITOM acts as a single source of truth for all IT resources within an organization be it on-premise or cloud. It can automatically discover all the IT resources within your organization, such as laptops, computers, monitors, routers, or even cloud services such as IaaS, PaaS, and FaaS.

Beyond this, ITOM also maintains a holistic view of firewall policies, an up-to-date inventory of all the TLS certificates, and alerts whenever certificates are about to expire. Furthermore, integration with ServiceNow ITAM can help organizations optimize the use of assets, ensuring they are fully utilized according to their capacity.

This holistic view enables organizations to manage these resources and achieve business objectives effectively.

2. Service Mapping

ServiceNow ITOM creates a visual representation of relationships between your applications, IT components, and cloud services outlining how each interacts with business services.

This feature can benefit an enterprise in the following ways;

• Gain a complete understanding of the group of applications working together i.e. application services providing specific services.
• ITOM is driven by service-aware operations enabling quick detection of problems, and prioritizing them based on their impact.
• With top-down mapping, ITOM makes it easy to detect the issues and their impact on the other IT components interconnected for specific services.
• With AI capabilities, ITOM can automate the generation of service maps based on different methods such as tag-based, top-down, and traffic-based.

3. Predict Issues and Automate Resolution With AI

ITOM leverages the capabilities of artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) to proactively identify the issues and resolve them quickly.

It identifies the patterns and trends in data collected across the IT domain of an organization. For example, it can be found that certain types of errors happen more commonly when a specific service is used. With this information, ITOM can automatically correlate all the patterns to find out the root cause of the problem.

Once the root cause of the problem is identified, ITOM can automate the resolution process ensuring speedy resolution and eliminating manual efforts.

Predictive AIOps capabilities of ITOM go beyond detecting service degradation, and downtime. It uses powerful automated workflows to predict the issue before it becomes an issue and correlate the noisy signals to resolve the issues faster. For example, ITOM can be integrated with ServiceNow Customer Service Management enabling customer service teams to proactively manage the issues before they impact the customers.

It can also be integrated with ServiceNow Field Service Management to automate the process of creating field service tasks and ensuring field technicians are dispatched proactively to address the issues within the IT infrastructure.

4. Proactive Firewall Policy Management and Auditing

ServiceNow ITOM enables businesses with complete visibility into their firewall policies. It creates a single repository of all your firewall data such as policies, software, firmware versions, patches, and other data.

This streamlines the process for firewall teams by providing a comprehensive view of each firewall policy, its associated owner, and the necessary asset data in one location. This consolidated information aids in maintaining firewall policies and addressing vulnerabilities effectively.

ServiceNow Service Portal enables the end users to submit and track requests for firewall rules change. These requests are automatically routed to the security team for risk analysis and approval. Once the request is approved, it is routed to the firewall team for implementation. This entire process is automated and tracked ensuring the low-risk while implementing the changes.

5. Pre-built and Certified Integrations

ServiceNow ITOM has pre-built and certified integration options known as Service Graph Connectors. These integrations enable the seamless importing of data from third-party sources into ServiceNow CMDB.

Service Graph Connectors are developed by third-party vendors and undergo rigorous ServiceNow testing to eliminate security vulnerabilities. Furthermore, these integrations comply with ServiceNow’s Identification and Reconciliation Engine (IRE), and Common Service Data Model (CSDM).

6. Speed Cloud Adoption

ServiceNow ITOM has a set of applications known as Cloud Accelerate that helps businesses accelerate their cloud transformation with full visibility from planning, automating, and managing cloud deployments.

ITOM with service mapping helps you understand the impact of cloud migration on various business processes. This will result in strategic migration of on-premises resources to the cloud minimizing the disruptions to your business operations.

ServiceNow ITOM Pricing

ServiceNow ITOM has the following three different pricing packages serving different business needs;

1. ITOM Visibility
2. ITOM Professionals
3. ITOM AIOps Enterprise

ITOM Visibility packages the following capabilities;

• Discovery
• Service mapping
• Certificate management
• Firewall audit
• Service Graph Connectors (Third-party integrations)
• CMDB
• Agent Client Collector

ITOM Professional includes all the capabilities of the Visibility package with additional offerings such as;

• Event management
• Metric intelligence
• Firewall audits and reporting

ITOM AIOps Enterprise package in addition to the capabilities of the Professional package includes the following;

• Health Log Analytics
• Cloud Accelerate

The pricing for each package is tailored to the business requirements. A ServiceNow Consulting company will perform a detailed evaluation of your business requirement, and provide flexible pricing tailored to you.

Final Take

ServiceNow IT Operations Management is empowering organizations of all sizes. From IT leaders, operations managers, and platform owners to service agents to accelerating digital transformation.

Want to learn more about ServiceNow ITOM or want to benefit from its capabilities? We have the resources to meet all your needs. Let’s connect with you to gain complete visibility of your IT infrastructure.