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ServiceNow® needs no introduction as a robust IT service management platform. It provides a comprehensive suite of tools for incident management and problem resolution. Also, for change management, and also comes with a powerful CMDB. While known for its flexibility and customization options, the provided solutions aren’t perfect.
There is scope to improve the capabilities of each IT service management capabilities. This improvement is particularly possible when integrated with solutions such as Virima that complement various ITSM features of ServiceNow®.
In this blog post, we’ll delve into the top benefit of Virima’s integration with ServiceNow®.
Top benefits of Virima and ServiceNow integration
An always up-to-date and correct ServiceNow® Configuration Management Database (CMDB)
Virima integration to ServiceNow® provides two most important capabilities– One is Virima Discovery and the other is service mapping. The former capability keeps ServiceNow CMDB data accurate and complete.
The role of Virima Discovery
The discovery solution provides agentless IP-based scanning, installable agent-based scanning, and scanning through API integration. This 360-degree discovery ensures that all on-premise assets, roaming and work-from-home PCs get discovered. Also, ensures assets in the cloud, popular hypervisor, storage, and monitoring solutions get discovered. As a result, the ServiceNow CMDB gets populated with the most accurate and complete asset data of the whole IT environment. Especially across the edge, data centers, and cloud environments.
The automated discovery ensures that the CMDB always reflects the latest state of your IT environment. Yet, Virima discovery allows you to set up automated workflows to update your CMDB whenever new assets are discovered or existing assets are modified. All these synced properties and configuration items are viewable within the ServiceNow CMDB.
Least we forgot to mention, Virima discovery integration to ServiceNow CMDB is 100 percent codeless.
The benefits of Virima service mapping
The other Virima feature that enhances the capabilities of ServiceNow CMDB is service mapping. The robust feature makes it easy to understand the dependencies between your IT assets in ServiceNow CMDB. With a few clicks, the multi-layer visualization of dependencies can show you what services an asset serves and is served by. As the ViVID service maps links automatically appear for each discovered asset (CIs) in the CMDB records, the ITSM users get to troubleshoot issues faster and plan changes due to the enhanced visualization.
Moreover, the data in CMDB plays crucial roles in IT management practices such as IT asset management, and IT service management. Hence ensuring a current and accurate CMDB is the most crucial benefit of Virima integration with ServiceNow®.
Streamlined IT Asset Management
The same capabilities that help to keep the CMDB current also enhance the IT asset management in ServiceNow®. Particularly when it comes to agent-based discovery. Upon integration, Virima’s Windows discovery agents frequently monitor network-connected Windows servers and PCs as well as alleviate credential and security-related issues.
Moreover, the new WFA (Work from Anywhere) solution from Virima keeps tabs on daily software usage and configuration changes on remote PCs over the internet. So irrespective of where the PCs roam, the daily software usage tracking through software license metering control costs (as part of ITAM resource optimization) by identifying and reclaiming underutilized licenses. All this particularly complements the software asset management capabilities of ServiceNow®.
IT service management
The Virima and ServiceNow integration enhances the incident, problem, and change management capabilities in ServiceNow ITSM in the following way–
Reduced incident resolution time
ServiceNow® is a comprehensive IT service management platform with robust incident management capabilities. However, the capability can be further enhanced in terms of reduced MTTR (Mean time to resolution) with Virima integration.
In this enhancement, the most important feature is Virima’s service mapping– the exclusive ViVID™ service maps. With this integration, you can easily understand how various services are dependent on and connected with each other. You’ll also have a clear visual representation of your entire IT infrastructure in any view type you want–- communication view, service topology view, or ViVID BSM (Business service maps) views.
This visualization induced an easy understanding of relationships leading to speedier incident resolution. For example, customer support teams can receive complaints about problems with payment processing services in a large e-commerce company. Once you open the incident in the ServiceNow ITSM dashboard, the links of business service maps (BSMs) will appear for the CI in question (in this case the payment processing service).
Now with the help of service maps, the IT team would be able to quickly identify the underlying components such as databases, servers, and network devices. Going into a deeper level of service maps, you can identify the database server to be responsible for the downtime. Thus your IT team can replace the server that’s running out of storage space and restore the service within no time. That’s how easy visualization through service maps reduces time spent on diagnosing and fixing the problem.
Proactive problem management
Going one step further, IT teams can do proactive problem management (in accordance with ITIL 4) with the help of Virima integration to ServiceNow®. As the Virima Service Mapping helps identify similar patterns and trends, ServiceNow ITSM users can set up alerting for storage capacity on critical servers to ensure proactive monitoring and timely intervention before the service disruption occurs. Similar altering can be set up for other assets or services as well that’ll help in proactive problem management.
Optimized Change Management
The same service mapping capability of Virima speeds up the change management process by reducing the change approval time. First of all, the service and application dependency maps at every ‘level depth’ overlays the recently completed change as well as pending changes.
As a result, the change management team can quickly see the relationship between devices, and applications in their present state. It also allows IT teams to simulate how services and applications can get impacted after making a proposed change. Due to the convenient change collision view, the reduction of CAB approval for urgent or even normal changes becomes possible.
Moreover, the change approval process also speeds up as the service maps make it easy to identify and coordinate with stakeholders for the proposed change.
Virima integration: Achieve enhanced IT service management capabilities in ServiceNow®
When the ServiceNow CMDB integrates Virima’s IT asset discovery and service mapping capabilities, the discovery feature of Virima keeps the CMDB data complete and accurate. At the same time, the service mapping makes it easy to understand the CI relationship in the CMDB. It is for faster troubleshooting and impact analysis for change management.
On the other side of Virima integration, the ServiceNow IT asset management platform benefits from the resource optimization. It is particularly software license metering solution from Virima. Whereas both incident and change management achieve a shorter resolution time and approval time respectively. It is due to visual maps provided by Virima’s exclusive ViVID service maps.
Book a demo to try out Virima integration with your ServiceNow® platform to experience enhanced IT service management capabilities!
