Whether an outage impacts email or e-commerce, companies feel the pain when services go down. Customers can be frustrated with a bad experience, and revenue and costs can be negatively impacted. IT teams need to focus on identifying the cause of an outage and prioritising remediation for fast resolution. But that is easier said than done.
A recent survey of nearly 1,000 IT leaders* underscores the top challenges IT faces in dealing with outages:
- 67% said the most difficult part of rectifying a service outage is pinpointing the root cause of the issue.
- 50% said identifying the affected business services is equally as difficult.
- 83% of the respondents are either manually mapping their services, which can be static and often out of date, or are not mapping their services at all. This makes it harder to locate and remediate the impacted services.
- 68% said service outages are frustrating, painful and stress inducing because of the back and forth communication with up to 25 different people on average, many of whom are on disparate teams.
To address these issues, ServiceNow has released the new ServiceWatch family of cloud-based IT operations management (ITOM) solutions. It is the industry’s only fully integrated, cloud-based system that can efficiently determine the root cause of service issues, identify business impact – such as email, CRM or billing going offline – and automate restoration of the service. ServiceWatch is able to correlate events from multiple monitoring sources to dynamic, real-time service maps, all stored in a single configuration management database (CMDB) within ServiceNow’s leading service management platform.
The ServiceWatch family has three offerings:
1) ServiceWatch Mapping—This includes mapping and discovery solutions to help IT teams identify the root cause of an outage and gain visibility into which services are connected to each system. An EMA survey** found that organisations that identified themselves as “extremely successful” in IT service management were nearly eight times more likely to have deployed or planned to deploy application discovery and dependency mapping.
2) ServiceWatch Insight—This includes ServiceWatch Mapping in addition to event management. It is designed to alert IT teams to service impacting issues so they can prioritise remediation. A configurable dashboard provides a consolidated view of service health, including a list of current active alerts, impacted services and associated incidents. Event management spawns a ServiceNow task from an outage alert, allowing IT teams to track resolution of the issue and giving a real-time view into the status.
3) ServiceWatch Suite—This contains all of ServiceNow’s ITOM offerings, adding in orchestration and cloud management, to provide the highest level of business agility. Through orchestration, IT can automate key processes and tasks associated with common use cases, such as employee on/off-boarding, password reset, email account creation, provisioning and management of cloud resources, server configuration and provisioning, system resets, and more. When combined, these automations allow IT to provide streamlined processes for remediating issues – ranging from the mundane to the severe. The software also allows IT teams to track the ROI of every automated task and estimate the cost savings for the automated tasks companies are considering implementing.
“With this release, we are reversing 40 years of IT operations gospel, addressing outages starting with the impacted service rather than the infrastructure,” said Michael Nappi, senior director of product management, ServiceNow. “Having a service-aware CMDB that IT teams can trust gives IT the confidence to quickly identify both the cause and business impact of an outage and automate the necessary actions to ensure service availability.”
“By using ServiceWatch, our response times improved by 76% and the mean-time-to-repair reduced by 10%,” said Andrew Tully, executive director of Information Technology Services, Federation University Australia. “More than ever before, IT performance and business performance are critically linked, and IT service outages can bring entire businesses to their knees,” said Dennis Drogseth, vice president, Enterprise Management Associates. “ServiceNow is taking a leadership role in unifying ITSM teams with operations. For example, ServiceNow has introduced unique automation procedures to accelerate remediation—and optimise service delivery in support of critical business needs.”
