February 4, 2018 at 18:07What can ITOM do and why is it needed
In 2018, Gartner experts predict a further increase in investment in IaaS, SaaS and PaaS, and expect ITOM to grow in popularity (managing and monitoring IT data centers).
In today's article, we will talk about what is the management of IT infrastructure and what are its benefits for the enterprise. We will also give some real cases of companies that were able to reduce costs by implementing ITOM ServiceNow. / Flickr / m1try / CC
ITOM ( IT Operations Management ) is a process whose goal is to automate the management of the company's IT infrastructure. Using ITOM, you can collect information about infrastructure elements and monitor the status of individual services and systems. This will help detect problems and solve them without costly downtime.
According to Gartner, the average cost of a minute of downtime of IT equipment in data centers of companies costs $ 5.6 thousand or $ 140-540 thousand per hour. For example, last year a crash occurred in the data center of British Airways, which resulted in canceled flights for 75 thousand passengers. The company had to pay about $ 68 million in compensation.
The goal of ITOM is to increase the efficiency of management processes and, as a result, the work of the entire company. Interestingly, the often routine tasks of detecting, diagnosing, and solving problems often cause new errors that entail more serious failures. ITOM allows you to resolve this situation and optimize business processes. As a solution, ServiceNow has developed a comprehensive set of modules. It includes:
The main service is the Discovery module, because it allows you to get information about the components of the infrastructure. It forms an actual database of objects, displays dependencies and tracks all changes made. The information Discovery collects can be used to automatically update the configuration management database (CMDB) and work with other ITOM services. To get acquainted with the capabilities of the ServiceNow Discovery module, we offer to see our tutorial :
ServiceNow offers a universal ITOM solution - it has been implemented by hundreds of large companies from various fields of activity: media, telecommunications, services and others. We give examples for these industries.
ITOM tools monitor the state of IT infrastructure in real time. This opportunity was taken by Time Warner, simplifying work with incidents.
Initially, all information about the events was sent to one email address, letters from which were manually viewed by Service Desk employees. The introduction of ITOM and the combination of several tools for different departments on the same ServiceNow platform made it possible to single out the highest priority incidents, which reduced their total number.
The American mobile operator, who wished to remain anonymous, also spoke about his experience with the ServiceNow platform and ITOM tools .
Prior to the introduction of Cloud Management (solutions for managing cloud resources), the company could not boast of high speed of customer service - on average, it took up to 5 days to provide a virtual machine.
Since the service was automated, this time was reduced to 1 hour, and the operator was able to redistribute resources in favor of other workloads. This allowed the supplier to save $ 5 million per year.
/ Flickr / car leasing made simple / CC
Another example is the KAR Auction Services auto auction case . The company sought to increase the customer focus of the business and deploy IT processes towards tasks that directly affect the quality of service and customer perception of the level of service.
First, the company introduced CMDB and used ServiceNow Discovery to populate it . Then KAR combined CMDB and ITIL processes, and then implemented event management and service topology.
The company has implemented a single source of information about all events in the corporate environment. Creating an alert, the KAR must have formed a procedure associated with it in order to know exactly the procedure for its operation.
This approach allowedbuild a flexible ITOM ecosystem, and the quality of services, as noted in the company, has improved markedly. In the future, KAR plans to automate the configuration of the infrastructure and create a catalog of business services.
It is significant that ServiceNow also uses tools for managing its IT infrastructure: Event Management, which automatically integrates with CMDB and ITSM processes, as well as Service Mapping.
Thanks to these products, the company was able toreduce the number of minor events (“noise”) by 98% by automatically prioritizing tickets (36,000 events turned into 529 incidents), save 9,600 hours (per year) by automatically managing alerts, reduce the total number of incidents by 67% and save 780 thousand dollars due to automation of processes.
A selection of materials from our corporate blog:
Some fresh articles from our blog on Habré:
In today's article, we will talk about what is the management of IT infrastructure and what are its benefits for the enterprise. We will also give some real cases of companies that were able to reduce costs by implementing ITOM ServiceNow. / Flickr / m1try / CC
ITOM goals and opportunities
ITOM ( IT Operations Management ) is a process whose goal is to automate the management of the company's IT infrastructure. Using ITOM, you can collect information about infrastructure elements and monitor the status of individual services and systems. This will help detect problems and solve them without costly downtime.
According to Gartner, the average cost of a minute of downtime of IT equipment in data centers of companies costs $ 5.6 thousand or $ 140-540 thousand per hour. For example, last year a crash occurred in the data center of British Airways, which resulted in canceled flights for 75 thousand passengers. The company had to pay about $ 68 million in compensation.
The goal of ITOM is to increase the efficiency of management processes and, as a result, the work of the entire company. Interestingly, the often routine tasks of detecting, diagnosing, and solving problems often cause new errors that entail more serious failures. ITOM allows you to resolve this situation and optimize business processes. As a solution, ServiceNow has developed a comprehensive set of modules. It includes:
- Module for collecting information about the structure of Discovery;
- Event management module
- The module for intelligent problem identification and troubleshooting (operational intelligence);
- Automation module for routine IT processes;
- Module for constructing a service topology;
- Cloud Management Module.
The main service is the Discovery module, because it allows you to get information about the components of the infrastructure. It forms an actual database of objects, displays dependencies and tracks all changes made. The information Discovery collects can be used to automatically update the configuration management database (CMDB) and work with other ITOM services. To get acquainted with the capabilities of the ServiceNow Discovery module, we offer to see our tutorial :
What does it give
ServiceNow offers a universal ITOM solution - it has been implemented by hundreds of large companies from various fields of activity: media, telecommunications, services and others. We give examples for these industries.
Media Companies: Time Warner Case
ITOM tools monitor the state of IT infrastructure in real time. This opportunity was taken by Time Warner, simplifying work with incidents.
Initially, all information about the events was sent to one email address, letters from which were manually viewed by Service Desk employees. The introduction of ITOM and the combination of several tools for different departments on the same ServiceNow platform made it possible to single out the highest priority incidents, which reduced their total number.
Telecommunication companies
The American mobile operator, who wished to remain anonymous, also spoke about his experience with the ServiceNow platform and ITOM tools .
Prior to the introduction of Cloud Management (solutions for managing cloud resources), the company could not boast of high speed of customer service - on average, it took up to 5 days to provide a virtual machine.
Since the service was automated, this time was reduced to 1 hour, and the operator was able to redistribute resources in favor of other workloads. This allowed the supplier to save $ 5 million per year.
/ Flickr / car leasing made simple / CC
Service companies: KAR and ServiceNow cases
Another example is the KAR Auction Services auto auction case . The company sought to increase the customer focus of the business and deploy IT processes towards tasks that directly affect the quality of service and customer perception of the level of service.
First, the company introduced CMDB and used ServiceNow Discovery to populate it . Then KAR combined CMDB and ITIL processes, and then implemented event management and service topology.
The company has implemented a single source of information about all events in the corporate environment. Creating an alert, the KAR must have formed a procedure associated with it in order to know exactly the procedure for its operation.
This approach allowedbuild a flexible ITOM ecosystem, and the quality of services, as noted in the company, has improved markedly. In the future, KAR plans to automate the configuration of the infrastructure and create a catalog of business services.
It is significant that ServiceNow also uses tools for managing its IT infrastructure: Event Management, which automatically integrates with CMDB and ITSM processes, as well as Service Mapping.
Thanks to these products, the company was able toreduce the number of minor events (“noise”) by 98% by automatically prioritizing tickets (36,000 events turned into 529 incidents), save 9,600 hours (per year) by automatically managing alerts, reduce the total number of incidents by 67% and save 780 thousand dollars due to automation of processes.
A selection of materials from our corporate blog:
- ServiceNow ITOM: Discovery Module Overview
- ServiceNow Discovery: How to Collect Infrastructure Information
- SPLAT Automated IT Processes on the ServiceNow Platform
- IT Infrastructure Management: How ITOM Helps IT
Some fresh articles from our blog on Habré:
