ServiceNow ITOM Service Mapping – An important cog in the ITOM Wheel
It’s difficult to pinpoint which IT services are most business critical unless you dig deep to understand the nature and use of each IT service within the organization. Classic case in point- Service Mapping.
Ever since it has been introduced, it has changed the dynamics for IT in a big way. After all, it helps teams within organizations to optimize process workflows and operational costs on the basis of traffic-based actions. What you get is a top-down view of all the services pertaining to the myriad applications and systems within your IT infrastructure.
Let’s take a look at some of the key features and benefits of service mapping, and why it has become one of the most important offerings from ServiceNow.
Key Capabilities
The key features of service mapping include Visibility, Efficiency and Accuracy.
Visibility – It helps administrators and managers evaluate the underlying impact of infrastructure services with ease and accuracy.
Efficiency – It reduces the amount of time spent in handling errors thereby enhancing productivity.
Accuracy – It empowers users with real time data since Service Map gets updated every time a change occurs.
Needless to say, Service Mapping brings along a host of benefits that are keeping IT managers happier and more efficient than ever.
Key Benefits
With ServiceNow ITOM Service Mapping, IT managers get reliable data that helps them make better decisions. They are now able to figure out where outages occur and how these outages impact the overall process.
This in turn helps improve resolution time while dealing with infrastructure problems. As compared to the efforts taken with ADDM tool where mapping is done manually, Service Mapping now helps reduce these efforts significantly.
The best part is that it achieves this with minimal inputs from service owners thus facilitating top-down mapping of services in a perennially changing cloud environment.
By throwing light on the relationship between applications, components and cloud services, Service Mapping has empowered IT managers with a humongous amount of knowledge, information and functionality.
In a dynamic IT environment, this kind of approach and power helps organizations stay up to date and make informed decisions.
Understanding how ServiceNow ITOM works:
Every organization relies on the Configuration Management Database or CMDB for inventory information though it is incapable of tracing root causes of incidents affected in an application or service.
The problem invariably lies in the device that was connected with the application or service and can be easily traced via Service Mapping.
This is possible due to the top-down views created by Service Mapping using a method called top-down discovery.
The types of top-down discovery methods are as follows:
Pattern-based discovery – The relationship between devices and services is discovered and nurtured via patterns. Patterns are nothing but a series of operations that create attributes for devices and their corresponding relations.
Traffic-based discovery – When traffic information within the network is used to build a comprehensive database about application services and related devices, the method is referred to as traffic-based discovery. It is more effective as devices that otherwise went unidentified in pattern-based discovery are identified by this one.
When devices and applications are treated as standalone, independent objects, the discovery is called horizontal discovery.
To summarize
Understanding the connection between devices and applications and mapping their dependencies give organizations greater clarity.
A whole gamut of components including tables, user roles, properties and scheduled jobs are factored in during Service Mapping.
Effective deployment of Service Mapping helps managers monitor business application performance successfully.
For more information on Service Mapping and its role in the management of IT infrastructure, contact our experts at ServiceNow IOTM today.
