Explain about ServiceNow monitoring tools?

sindhuja cynixit
6 min readFeb 25, 2021

You did not see any discussions or articles that were similar. If you are not sure how many of you in ServiceNow or anything similar are using the event management suite, but You wanted to put this out there to help you prevent any of the drawbacks we experienced as we rolled it out. To help minimize outages and improve productivity for your team and (if you have one) the EOC/NOC, there are several nice features available. Our mechanism began to resolve the creation of multiple events that generate due to notifications from multiple tools for the same outage. We can compare the warnings, display them on a service chart, and produce just one by making these alerts go through an event management method.

Definitions that you must know

The mechanism responsible for organizing events over their lifecycle is Event Management. One of the main IT operations functions is event management. It is a way to combine all events/alerts in one location from various monitoring systems to give you both more data and reduce the teams’ noise. Not all events should be an alarm and not all warnings should be accidents.

  • Event

A change of state that has some meaning for an IT service or a configuration item’s management. The value of these records will vary greatly from “telling you about the addition of a device to monitoring” to “telling you that a data center is offline.”

  • Alert:

A threshold violation warning, something has changed or a failure has occurred. Alerts are created and handled through monitoring software. The method of event management controls an alert’s lifecycle. The warning had to be an occurrence first.

  • Incident

An unplanned interruption or decrease in the quality of an IT service to an IT service. Often, an incident is a malfunction of a configuration item that has not yet affected the operation.

  • Noise

Unnecessary, duplicated, or correlated notifications to a larger problem. servicenow fundamentals training helps you to learn more effectively.

  • Signal

Unique warnings that are available, actionable, and contribute to either an incident or automatic remediation being developed.

Why the ServiceNow service?

Other resources are available that can do many of the same things I’m going to talk about here. You concentrate on ServiceNow because You have experience creating this integration from ServiceNow monitoring tools. The conversation will always support your trip, regardless of the instrument you use to handle event management.

Why would you want to use a management tool for events?

While instruments have their ways of managing accidents, warnings, and incident formation, they don’t speak to each other. You would potentially run into problems where two or more tools cause an incident for the same thing unless you have a single tool doing all your monitoring. To minimize noise, this can be avoided with resources such as the Event Management module within ServiceNow. Other advantages include the ability to start monitoring system notifications, changing records will mute alerts during the change window, search for patterns, produce reports, and, of course, create automation to reduce alert-induced repetitive tasks.

Where shall You begin?

If you have several tools for the organization handling your monitoring, which tool should you start with? Well, that depends on several variables. Is there a super quick way to integrate the tool, is there a tool that has the most accurate warnings, or is there a tool that most IT uses? “Do not try to boil the ocean,” Get the low-hanging fruit,” and “What gives you the most bang for your buck,” to throw some buzz-worthy phrases at you.” That simply means this; You would start small as you can always expand, if it makes sense, knocking out the easy things. But ultimately with the least amount of effort, what provides the greatest value.

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We began with a single computer that housed a lot of our monitoring. In ServiceNow, there was no out of the box connector for it and that tool sent emails for incidents to open. We found that while we were unable to use an API call to extract data from that method, it supported sending the data via the API. We also set up the integration so that it sends this to ServiceNow through the API to the event table when the tool generates an alarm. This helped me to establish rules about how to deal with these events.

Integration with SCOM was the next decision.

For this one, it was an out of the box integration and it was quickly in operation. It followed the same method.

A variety of other applications have used email integration to handle events. In plain text, the emails were sent in JSON format. Due to additional points of failure by using our (or tool vendor) email servers and ServiceNow email servers, these were relatively simple, but not a preferred process.

These were next in line.

For two reasons, it was interesting. The first was that there was a connector outside of the case. The second was that it had a plugin for integration with ServiceNow. What You came to find was that the plugin was for the creation of incidents and not the creation of events, and the out of the box connector worked, but the tuning was important.

Later in the segment on lessons learned, let us explain more. There were a few difficulties we encountered along the way, but it came together beautifully. You can now generate reports for teams that display their health as reported from all instruments, associate devices with their warning in a change window and label it as maintenance, develop a dashboard for customer experience, and we can feed these warnings to service maps (thanks to the work of our CMDB guy).

What’s pushing the roadmap forward?

There are other features that we have not yet begun to experiment with. The feature is most interested in pursuing will be Operational Intelligence. This is a section of the suite that searches for anomalies, extracting the metric data from your instruments.

What lessons have you gained?

It wasn’t as easy to incorporate warnings as we initially thought it would be. You want to go through the lessons learned from each of the resources and end with what we learned about the ServiceNow platform itself. Sharing this data will hopefully save you from the same problems when you do the integration.

Having Vistara send the events to ServiceNow via an API call worked well. We’ve had a few cases of their API service dying, but that’s not bad for over two years. When we started receiving the events in ServiceNow from Vistara, we discovered that many of these were not actionable and constructed rules to silence them. The remaining incidents then became alarms. You made a different set of rules for the notifications that provided additional details about the warning to our EOC. That information may be items such as an article on the knowledge base that tells them how to fix the problem, who to contact, what the seriousness of the incident if this should become an incident.

Conclusion

The ITOM suite has provided us with a wealth of information to enhance our services, increase awareness first, and recognize patterns to prevent potential problems. Though when we started this trip, we faced some challenges, the destination was well worth the difficulty. To make it efficient, the main takeaway, preparing what data you want to gather and how you want to use this information is important. Hence, you can know more about this through ServiceNow online training.

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