ServiceNow Event Management: Critical for the Health of Your Infrastructure

Event Management is critical for helping organisations to maintain and constantly monitor the health of their infrastructure, ensuring any disruption to operations is identified and resolved in real-time. A good Event Management platform should alert IT teams about potential problems or negative impacts to applications and systems and have predictive analysis that warns managers in advance about possible failures in the system.

Unfortunately, that’s the ideal, which is a long way from reality for most companies. Indeed, most struggle with Event Management because of old technology across their infrastructures, resulting in poor visibility into their business services. In truth: Event Management for many organisations is not just difficult, but nearly on impossible to carry out effectively.

The reputation of an organisation can be negatively affected as a result of outages and downtime, particularly now that end users expect services to be always available and always on. With most companies these days, it’s a competitive necessity to understand the business impact of an outage and downtime in real-time. Equally, it’s essential for IT managers to know which infrastructure components deliver a specific service and how these are connected. It’s the only way they’re going to find a quick solution to the problem.

A lot of failures result from legacy issues, meaning that there are often a huge number of disconnected monitoring tools overseeing the health of the services – and this increases the challenges for hard-pressed IT teams. It’s not unheard for companies to use between 30-50 tools, everything from multiple network management systems through to vendor-specific management tools. And, confusingly, these tools often report on the same issue.

So an organisation’s IT built on legacy technology often looks at an event within a bespoke mini-ecosystem. The outcome of this can mean that from a processing perspective there are 1,000-10,000 events an hour – and no one is capable of dealing with such high volumes of data, trying to understand what’s wrong.

The solution to all this noise and chaos? Connect all these points and bring events into the ServiceNow platform. Once they’re in, IT managers can start to process these and understand where they need to focus their time and give the operations team the ability to focus on the issues.

ServiceNow ITOM application provides Event Management with a suite of services. These help organisations to seamlessly detect events, resolving them with intuitive features. A single dashboard or ‘pane of glass’ tracks the health of IT applications helping to identify failures, solve problems and generating reports. This also includes automation to understand the root cause of problems, so predicting possible failures to maintain the health of the infrastructure.

Event Management collects raw events and processes them to generate qualified alerts for the affected CIs. It deduplicates events from monitoring tools into a single alert that can be automatically correlated with a CI in the CMDB.

With an alert bound to a CI, Event Management can relate the CI, incident and change history, which provides IT managers with a comprehensive insight into previous and existing failures. Automated root-cause analysis provides a view of CIs with confidence scores indicating the most probable cause of a service issue, dramatically reducing resolution time.

What the Event Management solution contains:

• Monitoring tool integrations
• Advanced correlation and deduplication to reduce alert volumes
• Predictive analysis to identify failures before they become big problems.

The Event Management solution is then tied to Service Mapping, Discovery and Orchestration. This overall solution helps to determine any business impact regarding the event and follow up remediation. This helps to:

• Correlate events and CI information to create a holistic view of the health of the infrastructure
• Activate service dashboards to track KPIs
• Use predictive analysis to help identify automated remediation, using orchestration workflows
• Trigger actions.

A good Event Management platform – along with other tools – is critical for the success of the IT function across the organisation. It will help increase operational efficiencies and ensure a faster return on investment. Using ServiceNow’s ITOM application, impact assessments can be generated using a top-down rather than a bottom-up approach.

Finally, for the moment at least, it’s worth noting that using automation, machine learning, and operational intelligence involves a massive change for many organisations and their IT teams. This is possibly one of the biggest problems companies face – culture change. It’s a big shift and it’s important for everyone to understand the benefits ServiceNow can bring. But it’s also about providing a better experience for the employees and the engineers, unlocking their productivity and making them able to work on more important tasks, driving change for the entire organisation.

This article was inspired by our video 'Event Management', recorded by Phil Davies, CEO of FlyForm, Adam Haylock, Senior Solutions Consultant at ServiceNow and Steven Williams, Senior Technical Consultant at FlyForm.

FlyForm is an elite ServiceNow partner with a keen focus on IT Operations Management (ITOM). Its proficiency lies in proactively spotting and rectifying operational challenges before they escalate. Collaborating with FlyForm ensures a resilient IT infrastructure, addressing potential disruptions ahead of time, and maintaining seamless operations.