firescope + servicenow: cmdb integration use cases · firescope + servicenow: cmdb integration use...

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FireScope + ServiceNow: CMDB Integration Use CasesWhile virtualization, cloud technologies and automation have slashed the time it takes to plan and implement new IT services, enterprises are still struggling to achieve the levels of agility and efficiency promised by these new technologies. The chief barriers to true agility and accountability are:

• Maintaining and communicating service configuration information across operational silos. All too often, the service desk, operations and domain specialists maintain their own information by hand, leading to inaccuracies and miscommunications hindering root-cause diagnosis and service remediation, thereby extending service outages.

• Too many siloed tools for monitoring and management must be updated to provide complete visibility of newly deployed services. It may take minutes to deploy a new service, but months are required to get adequate visibility to identify and trace performance and availability issues. In the mean time, IT is forced into fire fighting mode, as users are their only true notification of failure. This re-active stance is the reason so many IT departments have low organizational credibility.

• Reporting and capacity planning are highly disrupted by the state of continual change. As a result, organizations are forced to dedicate more man-hours to maintaining complex spreadsheets and accuracy becomes more suspect, leading ultimately to overspending, sunk costs and poor project accountability.

These barriers to agility and accountability can be eliminated through the latest phase of FireScope and ServiceNow integration, which combines best of breed Incident Management, CMDB and Service Performance Management for a fully automated, cloud-based management platform that provides a 360-degree view of your technology-based business services.. Through this integration, organizations only need to maintain a single service model that can be used for ticketing, monitoring, reporting, capacity planning and incident response.

This approach enables organizations to eliminate considerable manual efforts involved in deploying and managing new services, enables proactive response to service-impacting performance and availability issues, as well as faster root-cause analysis. In the following sections, this document will describe two common use cases for FireScope+ServiceNow integration, and the value delivered to the enterprise.

Capabilities at a glance:• ServiceNow CMDB is synchronized with FireScope, triggering automatic

best practice monitoring and management from the Service perspective, as they come online.

• As service-impacting incidents are identified by FireScope, incidents in ServiceNow are automatically generated to initiate incident response faster.

• Web service integration enables FireScope to automatically generate, track and close incidents in ServiceNow.

• Notes and comments are synchronized between both solutions.• Automation can be triggered based on criticality, event notification and

escalation.• User-configurable automation levels - you are in complete control.• One-screen configuration, with no need to write code or endure an

expensive professional services engagement.



Use Case 1: Rapid IT Service Performance Management The Business Challenge:This use case is focused on organizations that have previously implemented ServiceNow as their standard for service desk and CMDB. While they have a good understanding of how each element of their technology environment contributes to the services their users consume through the CMDB, the current network and application performance management (APM) tools typically deployed only offer asset-level visibility. Alerts are being generated for failed applications and performance issues, but without context regarding how these events impacted the larger services and user experiences. IT may make every effort to address every alert, but the high volume of alerts and lack of any ability to prioritize meant that issues that prevente their customers from doing business are slipping through.

The Business Need:• Service-based monitoring to enable IT to prioritize efforts based on their business impact to service delivery and customer

experiences.

• Easy deployment, configuration and automation, as the organization was too busy to dedicate additional staff members to configuring and managing yet another solution.

• Visibility across the complete service stack from a single dashboard, spanning from user experiences, through the application and server layers, and down to the environmentals.

• Self-adjusting configuration that can identify new services as they come online and automatically apply best practice data collection, analysis and dashboarding in a way that minimizes future manual efforts.

The Solution:A FireScope Stratis instance with Elastic Application Components (EACs), Elastic Web Components (EWCs) and Elastic Storage Components (ESCs) is deployed at the organization’s corporate data center, with FireScope Edge devices deployed at each remote data center. This initial configuration, which is typically operational on the first day, centralizes all service performance and relevant business metrics into a single, centralized data set.

Administrators walk through a simple web-based wizard in FireScope Stratis to configure integration with ServiceNow, using an account in ServiceNow dedicated for use by FireScope. The wizard collects connection information for the organization’s instance of ServiceNow, as well as filtering parameters for CMDB integration. Similar configuration is also applied on ServiceNow, prior to deploying FireScope.

Once completed, FireScope Stratis is able to aggregate Configuration Item details from ServiceNow’s CMDB, preserving the service model structure in the process. As these CI’s are added to FireScope Stratis, each is assigned to an Edge device, which performs a discovery scan on the asset to determine available attribute data for the hardware, operating system, storage, hypervisor and applications. Additionally, appropriate Blueprints are associated with each CI, defining attributes for data collection, Event Definitions for analysis and visualization controls specific to the class of CI. Data collection of attribute metrics from these assets is handled by the associated Edge device, which would then be reliably transferred by message queue to the central FireScope cloud for analysis.

Within just a few days, and with very little manual effort, the organization can achieve real-time visibility into the health of their technology environment in a way that is aligned with the service model they had created in ServiceNow. This visibility helps them understand which events are impacting user experiences and which can be safely de-prioritized, enabling them to move from responding to hundreds of alerts in a week to just a few service-impacting incidents. Additionally, the ServiceNow integration enables FireScope to automatically generate tickets based on these events in ServiceNow, with comments and ticket status continually



synchronized with the event in FireScope. In the case that FireScope identifies normal operating conditions, it can also automatically close the ticket. All of this automation contributes to saving hundreds of man-hours and dramatically increases the organization’s ability to identify, trace and resolve issues that are affecting their customers.

Business and IT leaders also gain their own dashboards in FireScope that answers their most pressing business questions such as ‘Are my customers able to do business with me online,’ and ‘Which customers are being impacted by incidents.’ When a service is in a degraded or failed state, these dashboards display relevant financial metrics and business impact calculations that help them understand the business implications of these issues. For issues of particular concern, they can easily drill down to see which assets are the source of the issue, that an incident in ServiceNow had been automatically generated, and view any comments and status updates logged in ServiceNow – all without leaving their FireScope dashboard.

As the organization rolls out new services using the service catalog and runbook automation capabilities in ServiceNow, the changes in their CMDB are pushed to FireScope via API for automatic configuration of service monitoring. Where an organization previously requires weeks and months to effectively monitor and manage new services, they can now have instant coverage enables them to get ahead of issues before users are affected.

Business Value:• Hundreds of man-hours previously spent maintaining configuration of monitoring and management tools are freed up to focus on

business-driving projects.

• IT was able to significantly reduce the number of alerts they were working, from hundreds of alerts that may or may not be impacting customers to a manageable few a week that were known to be impacting customers. More important than the the man-hours saved, fewer business service-disrupting events were slipping through the cracks and negatively impacting the business

• By lowering the complexity and prioritizing the organization’s ability to identify, trace and resolve issues. Their service coverage has been significantly enhanced, enabling them to move toward proactive management.

• Business and IT leaders now have a clear understanding of the health of their technology, as well as the business implications of issues in terms of which customers are unable to conduct business and the financial costs of outages.



Use Case 2: Automated Service Lifecycle ManagementBusiness Challenge:In this use case, we explore an organization that has implemented Agile development methodologies to outpace their competition by introducing new capabilities for their customers on very aggressive time tables, a methodology that is rapidly gaining adoption. Unfortunately, this rapid pace of change challenges incident response and cross team collaboration because most organizations lack a single, consistent interpretation of service configuration. The Help Desk, Operations and Development teams each maintain their own information that over time becomes increasingly inconsistent and out of date. Major outages can quickly turne into a blame game, exacerbating the situation.

The Business Need:• Consistent, accurate model of service dependencies that could be used by all teams, while also catering to the unique

requirements of the different teams (e.g. monitoring for Operations, ticket tracking for the Help Desk).

• Simplify the deployment and transition of new services and applications from development to operations without suffering significant gaps in coverage.

• Automate as many manual processes as possible. Like most businesses, this organization was seriously understaffed and needed to find ways to make their teams more efficient.

• The custom nature of their environment required considerable flexibility to push unstructured application data that the development and QA teams needed visibility into, in order to improve performance and stability.

• Predictive analytics capabilities to help the organization align capacity planning with projected business growth in order to stop overspending on capacity.

The Solution:Enterprises today have no stomach for an 18+ month, complex project. As a result, they are turning to ServiceNow, FireScope Stratis and FireScope Analytics. As seen in the previous case study, both FireScope and ServiceNow can be deployed at a fraction of the time of traditional approaches, and through FireScope’s Big Data architecture, have the on-demand scalability to support its role as a single system of record for enterprise service performance monitoring.

In most cases, this scenario would start with ServiceNow’s CMDB. Immediately after completing the initial population of the ServiceNow CMDB, the integration wizard in FireScope Stratis is used to connect the two solutions together and FireScope can immediately begin synchronizing its service model with ServiceNow. The service model in this use case was heavily influenced by an emphasis on supporting a clean transition between development, QA and operations with each iteration major applications encapsulated in a Service Group that was labeled with its current lifecycle status. As a version moves from Development to QA, for example, the complete service group can simply be relabeled to reflect the transition, enabling QA to take advantage of the existing historical record of performance data.

Queue length and transaction performance are persistent areas of performance and stability issues for enterprise applications. Leveraging FireScope’s Dynamic Data Payload capability, which enables developers to push large amounts of unstructured data programmatically to the solution for analysis, developers are able to add a few lines of code within their java-based application to send transaction timing information, queue length metrics and more to FireScope. After a few weeks of data collection, they can develop operational baselines for these key metrics, which are used to define Event Definitions to alert staff or trigger automated remediation by FireScope. As a direct result, the performance and reliability of these customer facing applications can improve considerably, which also leads to decreases in visitor abandonment and increased revenue for the business.



On a day-to-day basis, every member of the organization’s Development, QA, HelpDesk, Operations and Leadership teams can rely on their FireScope dashboards for the actionable intelligence they need to help the business grow. Developers use the deep attribute data retention that FireScope’s Big Data architecture provides to evaluate the performance impact of code changes by comparing against previous versions. Quality Assurance relies on the solution’s User Experience monitoring against new builds to verify that all critical customer use cases are error free and performing above minimum requirements. The Operations team relies on the complete end-to-end visibility that FireScope provides to get ahead of service-impacting issues and ensure high availability. Help Desk users have been able to slash the time it takes them to trace issues to their source through FireScope’s 2-clicks to root-cause, made especially easy due to the linkage between ServiceNow incidents and FireScope events. Business owners and IT leadership finally have a business-aligned perspective on their production environment that includes insights into revenue generation and customer adoption of new capabilities that have helped guide critical business decisions.

Due to the fact that everyone is now on the same page with regard to service dependency, communication between teams will radically improve. The blame game is rarely played as everyone has direct line of sight between users and the source of performance and availability issues. In their final stage of implementation, capacity planning is targeted.

All too often, business decisions regarding infrastructure investment are driven by assumptions rather than data, simply because it takes too long to collect and analyze all of the data necessary. FireScope Analytics changes this by enabling predictive analytics against the extensive set of technology metrics and business data FireScope Stratis collects. Now, architects and IT leaders can, on-demand, evaluate service consumption from the user and transaction perspective. Once they know the exact resource requirements needed to support every thousand customer transactions, they can use this to project anticipated business growth and compare against current capacity. This can help them identify which resources require expansion, by how much and by what date it would need to be available. In the first year alone, this can save millions by delaying or reducing expenditures until business growth requires them.

Business Value:• Enables a single, accurate and consistent model of critical services and their dependencies, improving cross-team collaboration

and service availability.

• Reduces the duration of outages and performance issues by eliminating the blame game and reducing root-cause analysis to just a few clicks.

• Simplifies the transition of new releases and services through the development lifecycle, while preventing the potential for inaccuracies due to redundant, manual efforts.

• Reduces manual provisioning and maintenance efforts by hundreds of hours across multiple teams, enabling them to focus on business-driving projects.

• Business leaders now have a clear line of sight into how their investments in technology are delivering value for the business.

• Eliminates overspending on technology by aligning capacity planning with the consumption of the services.

ConclusionThe combination of FireScope + ServiceNow is the only fully automated, cloud-based management platform that empowers enterprises to manage the complete lifecycle of their critical services with best of breed Incident Management, CMDB and Service Performance Management. At a lower cost point and complexity than required to implement traditional enterprise management suites, your organization can easily get on the same page with a consistent and highly accurate understanding of your critical services and their health, performance and business impact. After reading about the value these organizations realized with this complete management ecosystem, imagine what it could do for you. Get started today by visiting http://www.firescope.com/ServiceNow/.

firescope + servicenow: cmdb integration use cases · firescope + servicenow: cmdb integration use...

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