Architecture Matters
It's spring in my hometown of Pinehurst, North Carolina and the scores golfers arriving here daily are experiencing more than world-class fairways—they are entering a community where every element serves both beauty and function. Pinehurst was designed that way by one of America's most important architects, Frederick Law Olmsted. Across the world In Japan, the city of Yokohama, the namesake of our latest release, is also celebrated for transforming industrial spaces into harmonious urban designs that balance tradition with innovation. ServiceNow's Yokohama release brings this same architectural elegance to your view of your company's technology landscape. By extending our Common Service Data Model, we're creating a foundation where, like Olmsted's carefully placed pathways in Pinehurst or Yokohama's thoughtful waterfront, every element serves a clear purpose while adapting seamlessly to future needs—especially as we enter the age of AI.
The Yokohama release strengthens your organization's data foundation through four key innovations: CSDM 5, API Insights, new API Service Graph Connectors, and Service Graph Connector Central. Let's explore how these updates improve visibility, integration, and data architecture to support your digital transformation journey.
CSDM 5: Architecture for the AI Era
The Common Service Data Model (CSDM) continues to evolve in Yokohama, expanding to support more use cases across our product portfolio. Once considered just a clever way to represent the underlying structure of the ServiceNow Platform, CSDM has evolved to become an essential blueprint to maturity. Organizations across industries from European banks to Japanese auto makes recognize its value in connecting disparate systems, various products and creating a unified view of technology services.
CSDM 5 introduces a restructured domain framework that better reflects how data flows through its lifecycle:
- Ideation & Strategy: A new domain capturing planning elements and business models
- Design & Planning: This domain has been enhanced to handle business applications, platform hosts, and product models
- Build & Integration: Now includes software bill of materials (SBOM) support in line with Cyclone DX specifications
- Service Delivery: Introduces the "Service Instance" base class, providing greater flexibility for different industry contexts
- Service Consumption: Focuses on offerings, products, and services available to customers
One of the most significant additions is support for AI governance through new configuration items: domain-specific LLM, AI Application, AI Function, GPU, among others. These CIs allow you to document, track, and manage AI components as they become increasingly integrated into your business processes.
CSDM 5 doesn't require activation—it's already part of your ServiceNow platform, providing the connective tissue that maximizes value across workflows. And you don't need to separately install additional components--elements of CSDM are baked into every release and family update. Like any good architectural blueprint, CSDM gives your data and processes the underlying coherence to govern current operations and to guide future innovation. You're probably in the middle of evaluating scores of new AI offerings--ServiceNow's CSDM allows you to go as deep into modeling as you go wide applying the AI. And technological transparency should be non-negotiable in any well conceived AI roadmap. You can't know if your AI is safe and effective unless you understand where your AI is working.
For more information: https://www.servicenow.com/now-platform/common-services-data-model.html
API Insights: Discover your Integration Points and Design Accordingly
In today's interconnected enterprise, APIs serve as the vital connectors between applications and services. Yet many organizations lack visibility into these critical integration points, creating blind spots in their service management and planning.
API Insights—available via controlled release during the Yokohama time frame, helps your enterprise solve this challenge by providing unprecedented visibility into your API ecosystem. Through specialized ServiceNow Graph Connectors, it ingests API information from various sources into your CMDB, creating a comprehensive map of integration points across your technology landscape.
The business impact is substantial.
- Greater operational resilience: Quickly identify which APIs might be causing system failures
- Enhanced planning capabilities: Understand integration dependencies when planning changes or migrations
- Regulatory compliance: More easily demonstrate management of integration points for audit requirements
- Cross-platform visibility: See beyond individual middleware solutions for a complete enterprise view.
While separate API gateway or middleware solutions (Kong, MuleSoft, TIBCO, AWS, etc.) have their own monitoring capabilities, only ServiceNow API Insights provides a consolidated view across all these technologies. Yokohama introduces new connectors for Apigee, AWS, and Azure to complement the existing Kong connector, with more planned based on customer feedback.
By bringing this granular level of detail into your CMDB, you gain both tactical operational benefits and strategic planning advantages that were previously unattainable.
API Service Graph Connectors: Expanding Your Integration Landscape
The Yokohama release introduces a range of new Service Graph Connectors specifically designed to enhance API visibility and management. These purpose-built connectors serve as the foundation for the API Insights workspace, enabling automated discovery and mapping of your API ecosystem.
New API-focused connectors in Yokohama include:
- Apigee: Capture API details from Google's API management platform
- AWS API Gateway: Map APIs deployed on Amazon Web Services
- Azure API Management: Discover and monitor Azure APIs
- Kong: Incorporate APIs across a variety of environments.
These connectors extract rich metadata about your APIs, including endpoints, usage patterns, and dependencies, bringing this critical information into the ServiceNow CMDB in context with your existing infrastructure. The result is a more complete picture of how your applications integrate and communicate.
For organizations struggling with traditional discovery methods due to security constraints, these API connectors provide an alternative path to gaining visibility. Rather than requiring direct access to systems, they connect to the management platforms where API configurations already exist.
Many customers report dramatic time-to-value improvements with Service Graph Connectors, with some Fortune 50 companies achieving production implementation in as little as one week. This rapid deployment capability significantly accelerates your ability to establish comprehensive service mapping and dependency tracking.
Service Graph Connector Central: Many Integrations, One View
With over seventy Service Graph Connectors now available, managing them effectively has become increasingly important. The Yokohama release addresses this need by introducing Service Graph Connector Central—a unified interface for discovering, deploying, configuring, and troubleshooting all your connectors.
This new command center provides:
- Streamlined discovery: Quickly find available connectors for your environment
- Simplified administration: Manage all connectors from a single interface
- Enhanced troubleshooting: New analysis capabilities with AI-assisted skills to resolve connector issues
- Performance monitoring: Track connector health and data quality
Service Graph Connector Central includes improved analysis capabilities that feed information to the Integration and Reconciliation Engine (IRE) , essuring the right data is loaded correctly every time, without duplication. The addition of AI-assisted skills further accelerates troubleshooting by providing intelligent recommendations based on observed patterns.
The business impact is significant—reduced time managing connections means faster time-to-value for your CMDB initiatives. By centralizing connector management, your team can focus more on using the data and less on maintaining the pipelines that collect it.
Building Your Foundation for the Future . . . Thoughtfully
Just as a well-designed landscape creates both immediate enjoyment and lasting value, the architectural improvements in the Yokohama release deliver both short-term gains and long-term advantages. The enhanced CSDM 5 model, powerful API Insights, expanded Service Graph Connectors, and centralized management capabilities combine to create a comprehensive data foundation that's ready for whatever comes next—including the transformative potential of AI.
By implementing these capabilities, you're not just improving your current operations—you're preparing your organization for a future where data quality, visibility, and integration become increasingly critical to success.
After all, the best architectures, like those in Pinehurst or Yokohama, don't just solve today's challenges—they anticipate tomorrow's opportunities.
