ServiceNow Discovery Integration Case Study
Company – Canadian federally regulated trust company. Industry – Finance. Solution – IT Operations Management. Tools & frameworks – Discovery, CMDB, MID servers, Business Service Mapping. The Client’s IT organization relied on a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) to manage infrastructure changes and diagnose problems. Previous CMDB implementation struggled to remain current, did not contain the correct type of information to drive processes efficiently, and was impossible to integrate with other tools. As a result, the IT staff could neither quickly determine which business services were affected
by changes, incidents, or performance issues nor could they quickly find service owners, impacted parties, and root causes of the service failure. The Client’s business depends on the mission-critical services delivered by the IT organization, so process failures and communication breakdowns were intolerable. The Client decided to deploy the ServiceNow IT Operations Management suite and hire GeeksForLess consultants to run it.
BENEFITS ACHIEVED
Agentless Discovery
collects data about configuration items on the network and stores it in a database readily available for the enterprise tools supporting many processes.
Optimal positioning of MID servers within the network
allowed to use network resources wisely and group similar data sources based on system type, access protocol, or physical location.
Custom Discovery probes and sensors
developed by GeeksForLess allowed collecting data from the configuration items that are unique to the Client’s business and specific to their organization’s needs.
Configuration Management Database
is critical for IT infrastructure visibility and controllability. Automatic CMDB updates based on continuous Discovery save an enormous amount of effort the stakeholders were putting in the past to keep it current. Automation also prevents mistakes, miscommunication, and other human factors.
Business Service Mapping
provides the graphic representation of dependencies and connections between the configuration items from the business point of view.
Baseline for further ServiceNow implementation
CMDB and Service Maps are invaluable for further automation
of ITSM, IT Operations, Governance, Security, and other processes.