We are pleased to announce the following innovations for CMDB in the Vancouver family and Q3 Store releases.
Unified Map View
In my previous career, I worked as a partner to help ServiceNow customers implement Asset and Operations Management. At the end of every successful implementation, I took great pride in leading my clients and executive sponsors through a series of Dependency Views of their new CMDBs, now full of rich, interlocking details about their newly discovered infrastructure. The effect was magical! While my colleagues supporting the help desk provided a cake at the end of their implementation, I got to provide the icing.
As soon as the wonder of virtually flying through related servers, network gear, and hypervisors had died down, my clients wanted to talk next steps and start mapping services, to give themselves an even more focused and practical accounting of their critical applications —the Service Map View.
With the Vancouver release, customers can shorten the time between celebrations. Customers who have upgraded to the Vancouver release and downloaded the CMDB Workspace v4 from the store can now visualize their infrastructure in the Unified Map view. The Unified Map view combines the best of Dependency and Service Map Views.
The Unified Map preserves the power of the Dependency View including the ability to create multilevel graphs of related elements, to filter it to show only what is most relevant, and to switch to a forced layout. It seamlessly blends into the logical elements from the Service Map view like web servers and application elements that are critical to understand how the service is constructed.
Like the Dependency View, the Unified Map provides the ability to show detailed breakdowns of related incidents, changes, and alerts on a separate pane, allowing operators, admins, and agents to seamlessly move between a wide view of an application and detailed business and technical context.
To preserve the focus and efficiency of the ServiceMap view, a modern user interface allows customers to control the number of layers, the CI Types, the Discovery Sources, and even to filter by relationship types or common CI elements like location or owner.
For now and for the immediate future, the Unified Map will be available right alongside the old Service Map and Dependency views and solely from the CMDB Workspace v4 or later. While we bring the Unified Workspace to full parity of features with existing views, customers on the Vancouver family release can rely on both views. Customers can have their cake (and icing) and eat it, too.
Service Graph Connector for Open Telemetry - A cloud-native method to discover Kubernetes applications and microservices
Service Graph Connectors allow customers to load large volumes of data quickly and easily into their configuration management database (CMDB). They also help reduce the risk associated with third-party data integration, as they’re certified by ServiceNow and designed, developed, and tested under the Service Graph Connectors program.
The new OTel Service Graph Connector connector offers customers the benefits of a thriving open-source community alongside the confidence they have in the Now Platform.
The Service Graph Connector for OpenTelemetry brings cloud-native data into the workspace that ServiceNow users are familiar with, allowing them to diagnose and triage without having to switch contexts. By using actual telemetry data generated by cloud-native applications, we’re creating accurate, automated, and near-real-time service maps.
For many organizations, the biggest difference between the Service Graph Connector for OpenTelemetry and other data sources is the ease of deployment combined with the breadth, depth, and accuracy of cloud-native data imported into the CMDB.
Service maps can now span cloud and traditional environments via inferred services, a.k.a. non-instrumental services, a capability that exists in Cloud Observability. This will provide a more complete view of the end-to-end technical estate that organizations rely on.
We’re also excited to introduce additional Kubernetes infrastructure objects that enable a more granular view of an organization’s Kubernetes estate in the CMDB, including:
- Clusters
- Namespaces
- Workloads
- Nodes
- Pods
- Containers
- Services
It’s time to unify the vast—and fractured—technology estate that many enterprises maintain. You can manage it all through a single environment: the Now Platform.
Stay tuned to this blog for more information about what’s coming in future releases.
