What is ServiceNow IT Operations Management?

Is your company using ServiceNow IT Operations Management or considering using it? If so, you know the importance of enhancing the visibility of your IT infrastructure and services, protecting against service disruptions, and enhancing your company’s operational flexibility.

In this blog, we’ll discuss how ServiceNow ITOM works, improves visibility across the entire IT infrastructure, and streamlines operations. We’ll also discuss how ServiceNow ITOM is better together with AIOps. Learn how artificial intelligence can optimize your deployment, from automatically identifying patterns to correlating alerts to automating root cause analysis, that help you further maximize your ServiceNow ITOM investment. 

Read on to learn:

• What is ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM)?
• What is the difference between ServiceNow IT Service Management and ServiceNow IT Operations?
• Key features of ServiceNow ITOM
• Benefits of ServiceNow ITOM
• How does ServiceNow ITOM work with AIOps?

What is ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM)?

ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) is a suite of tools designed to automate and streamline the operational management of IT infrastructure, applications, and services. It provides a unified platform for IT teams to gain visibility, manage services, and optimize cloud resources. Through ITOM, ServiceNow allows ITOps, DevOps, and SRE teams to reduce outages, improve service availability, and enhance operational efficiency.

How are ServiceNow IT Service Management and ServiceNow IT Operations Different?

ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) is a comprehensive suite of tools and processes designed to manage and deliver IT services to external customers. Key aspects of ServiceNow ITSM include Service Desk, Incident, problem, and change management.

In contrast, ServiceNow IT Operations (ITOM) focuses on managing and optimizing the IT infrastructure and operations to ensure the reliability, availability, and performance of IT services. ITSM focuses on aligning IT services with business needs, while ITOM manages the operational aspects of running those services effectively.

Key capabilities of ServiceNow ITOM

ServiceNow ITOM encompasses a range of modules designed to manage different aspects of IT operations. These product features enable teams to oversee and improve IT infrastructure and operations for better reliability, availability, and IT service performance.

• Discovery: This process involves identifying and cataloging every IT asset within an organization. It ensures a comprehensive view of all technology components, from hardware to software, across the enterprise.
• Service mapping: This provides a clear visualization of how various IT components interconnect and depend on each other. By mapping these dependencies, businesses can understand how individual IT elements contribute to overall service delivery.
• ServiceNow CMDB: ServiceNow’s Configuration Management Database (CMDB) centralizes information on all IT assets and their relationships. It serves as a single source of truth for IT infrastructure, aiding in effective management and decision-making.
• Event management: This pertains to monitoring, detecting, and responding to events that can affect IT services. Proper event management ensures uninterrupted service delivery and quick resolution of potential issues. It can also include an Operational Intelligence capability, which uses ML to analyze performance issues in IT infrastructure and applications. 
• Cloud management: This encompasses swift response and adaptation to service issues while ensuring optimal utilization of cloud resources. By managing and optimizing cloud usage, businesses can achieve cost savings and improved performance.

Benefits of ServiceNow ITOM

ServiceNow ITOM improves visibility across your infrastructure and services, enabling proactive identification and resolution of issues to minimize disruptions. By automating specific processes and integrating various IT components it streamlines operations, reduces costs, and boosts overall efficiency.

• Enhance visibility and control: ServiceNow ITOM provides a comprehensive view of the entire IT infrastructure, including hardware, software, and service. This enables organizations to better understand dependencies and the overall health of their IT environment. It helps to improve service quality and minimize software compliance issues.
• Proactive issue identification and resolution: ServiceNow ITOM can detect issues early by discovering and mapping all IT infrastructure components. They are often detected before they impact users or become major problems. This reduces downtime and service disruptions.
• Operational efficiency and automation: ServiceNow ITOM automates routine tasks, standardizes processes, and reduces the need for manual interventions, allowing IT teams to work more efficiently and reduce operational overheads.

Optimize your ITOM with Artificial Intelligence

AIOps enhances the capabilities of ServiceNow ITOM, and expands upon ServiceNow’s event management capabilities with unique business and technical benefits. With AIOps, you can use AI and ML to identify patterns across monitoring and observability alert data to create correlation patterns automatically. AIOps can even automate root cause analysis to identify the change that caused an incident, which makes the incident response in ServiceNow ITSM faster. 

Augments your ServiceNow ITOM deployment with BigPanda AIOps

The BigPanda AIOps platform delivers incidents with in-depth context to ITOps teams using ServiceNow, ensuring your team has comprehensive, real-time insights into processes. Our platform uses AI and machine learning (ML) to automate alert correlation, reduce noise, give context to alerts, automate root cause analysis, and provide critical business insights.

We do this with our powerful, built-in ServiceNow integration, facilitating two-way synchronization between BigPanda and ServiceNow. This advanced integration enhances IT operations in three fundamental ways.

• Ticket reduction and automation for high-volume monitoring data: Streamline and automate bulk monitoring data. BigPanda’s machine learning technology synthesizes vast numbers of monitoring alerts into discernible high-priority incidents, reducing noise by up to 99%. This optimization leads to a significant decrease in the auto-generated tickets in ServiceNow for these incidents. A two-way synchronization guarantees that ticket updates remain consistent across platforms throughout an incident’s duration.
• Service dependency mapping for dynamic infrastructure: BigPanda offers dynamic infrastructure service-dependency visualization.  BigPanda’s instantaneous topology framework integrates topology information from the ServiceNow CMDB. This enhances it with data from configuration management, cloud and virtualization systems, and APM tools. These capabilities provide ITOps teams with a comprehensive, constantly refreshed perspective of their complete technological infrastructure for superior event correlation.
• Root cause analysis for continuously delivered applications: Swiftly detect the root cause, even with constantly changing applications. BigPanda aggregates change metrics from diverse origins, including the CI/CD pipeline and ServiceNow Change Management. It also aligns these modifications with the instigated incidents. 

Internally, BigPanda uses AI/ML to pinpoint potential root causes in real-time.This enables ITOps teams and developers to identify and retract these modifications to fix disruptions promptly.

Why ServiceNow and BigPanda are better together

Relative to ServiceNow’s native AIOps solution, BigPanda provides many essential and differentiated business and technical capabilities, allowing you to maximize the value of your ServiceNow ITOM investment. 

Business benefits

BigPanda AIOps provides ease of use and time to value. BigPanda makes your incidents highly actionable and ensures tickets have rich contextual information that includes CMDB, topology, and change data. This ensures that all the pieces from ITOM are working smoothly to benefit ITSM teams. It also reduces dependency on technical resources, promoting easier deployment and maintenance.

Technical benefits

BigPanda AIOps augments ServiceNow’s data ingestion and correlation processes. Instead of a rules-based approach, our AIOps uses AI/ML to simplify event correlation. Additionally, it draws from various sources to enhance ServiceNow’s CMDB, ensuring effective alert correlation and aiding in root cause analysis. 

Customers can use BigPanda “headless,” so the platform can fit seamlessly into the native ITSM environment. This combines ITOM and BigPanda to bring their capabilities and benefits together, ensuring a smooth adoption process without migration issues. In short, BigPanda AIOps complements and strengthens ServiceNow ITOM, offering your team a more streamlined IT operations management solution.

Harness the power of Generative AI

BigPanda lets you leverage the latest Generative AI innovations with high-quality, enriched IT alert data. This lets you automatically and reliably reveal key incident analysis, incident impact, and probable root cause in natural language. With BigPanda’s Generative AI capabilities, you can automatically create titles, summaries, and identify impact. The quality of this output leverages ServiceNow ITOM products and is seamlessly delivered to customers using tickets in ITSM.

See what ITOM optimization looks like with BigPanda

BigPanda AIOps enhances ServiceNow ITOM by streamlining alert management, improving correlation, and reducing manual rule creation. To experience these benefits firsthand, schedule a demo with BigPanda.

With advanced AI capabilities, BigPanda fills gaps in the ITOM process, leading to faster issue resolution and greater time to value. If you’re deeply rooted within ITOM, consider connecting directly to BigPanda to harness innovative AI technologies, amplify your understanding of incidents, and accelerate MTTR.