This article is all about the ServiceNow DevOps application which helps you to manage and streamlines the software development process.
In this article, we will understand what the ServiceNow® DevOps application can provide? Also, we will understand how it can work with an existing DevOps toolchain to provide data insights, accelerate change, and increase visibility in a DevOps environment, all in one single source system
Overview
ServiceNow DevOps is an integrating environment for overseeing your Software development process and streamlining it.
ServiceNow DevOps works with the Now Platform and other information already in ServiceNow to deliver major value outcomes including improving the developer experience, returning time to the development team, accelerating innovation, improving production stability in the face of rapid change, and reducing costs.
The ServiceNow DevOps application collects data across the entire set of lifecycle activities to provide visibility for DevOps teams. So they can own the end-to-end process (Plan, Develop, Build, Test, Deploy, Operate). Visibility across the entire DevOps toolchain, versus a single application, exposes overall performance, including areas in the process that may need improvement. As a result of this visibility, enterprise governance can be accelerated using DevOps, including automating change decisions.
Before starting with SN DevOps, Let’s understand first, What DevOps is?
DevOps is about the people and how they organize to work as a unified team to deliver products and the processes they use.
DevOps is a set of software development practices that combine software development and IT operations to shorten the systems development life cycle while delivering features, fixes, and updates frequently in close alignment with business objectives.
Or we can say –
DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes.
Now Let’s check, What ServiceNow DevOps is?
The ServiceNow DevOps provides a single source of information to give stakeholders visibility into each step of the development process. It does so by gathering analytics from each of the development tools and automating the change process.
ServiceNow DevOps is a dashboard-based interface that allows you to connect to the important deployment tools in every step of your software engineering lifecycles like planning, coding, and orchestration. You will be able to create value through transformation & integration with ServiceNow DevOps. With this, you can now leverage the Now platform to improve the development and deployment process and reduce time spent on administrative processes.
A DevOps-based delivery pipeline is all about getting developers and operations staff to:
- Work together better
- Think and act on the same wavelength
- Remove barriers and siloed structures
- Share responsibilities
This ServiceNow DevOps is designed to expand DevOps success across the enterprise and reduce the friction between IT operations and development, primarily by enabling change management to operate at DevOps speed.
It starts by connecting to the tool for every step-in pipeline. ServiceNow can connect with tools which are for planning, coding, and orchestration. ServiceNow DevOps Supports various DevOps tools out of the box.
Integration:
Out-of-the-box integrations to standard tools in the DevOps toolchain is among the primary use cases. More tools will be added with upcoming releases. With SN DevOps, tools like Jira and ITBM Agile (for planning), GitHub and Bitbucket (Code repositories), Jenkins (CI/CD Pipeline), and accessing data from ServiceNow Agile Development (Agile 2.0) and other ServiceNow products are available for integration.
Automation: leverage data from integrations to connect to ServiceNow ITSM Change Management. This will simplify the use of Change Management features and APIs to assess changes from the DevOps pipeline and to automate them where appropriate. Change approval policies will be a core component of this automation. —the DevOps product will add an out-of-the-box capability to the whole process.
Shared Insights: With end-to-end perspectives of the DevOps toolchain, there will be unique insights into development and operations. This includes information for developers on production data and information for services on changes such as the ability to trace a switch back to the changes in the original code commit and report on test runs.
Example/Lifecycle: ServiceNow DevOps can make API calls from development tools like GitHub and Jenkins and create automated change requests for commits, which then go through an automated change approval engine that leverages input triggers, decision trees, and predefined answers to provide a set of business rules that can automatically determine if a change can be approved. It can also add human intervention when needed to ensure change policies are being adhered to and to stop bad changes from making it into production.
Push-Button Audit is accomplished by gathering all the data throughout the process and capturing the chain of custody that took place throughout the end-to-end lifecycle of a release. From Ideation – (This is where the idea originated. Or we can say the Epics and stories that this release was a part of.) to Development – (These are the commits that were made, this is who made the commits. these are the files that changed) to Release – (These are the jobs that ran. This is what was in the build. These are the tests that were run and test results. These are the automated change policies that were applied.) to Production – (This is when we released to Production.) to Operations – (This was the change that caused an incident. This is how we rolled back.)
ServiceNow DevOps supports the following tool integrations.
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Planning: Azure DevOps Boards, Jira, ServiceNow Agile Development 2.0
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Coding: Azure DevOps Repos, GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket
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Orchestration: Azure DevOps, Jenkins, GitLab Cl
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Software Quality: SonarQube for Azure DevOps and Jenkins
ServiceNow DevOps Tools Landscape
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Automated DevOps change management: Automate the change management process by connecting to the existing CI/CD toolset to collect the data required to create change tickets, calculate risk, and automate approvals. This cuts the time needed for DevOps teams to obtain approval for changes.
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Automate audit reporting or Continuous Compliance: Maintain an end-to-end audit trail that correlates the pipeline, releases, and incidents to eliminate manual audit data collection time. Effectively reduce the time needed for “reactive” audit data gathering from weeks to minutes by integrating with the tools that generate needed data with audits, aggregating it in ServiceNow, and enabling automated report generation.
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Insights and Analytics: Help DevOps teams track performance and potentially increase their release speed while gaining visibility into tooling for ops. SN provides real-time DevOps insights and analytics that help to identify and understand your High-performance teams, low-performance teams and starts to see breakdowns in your value stream for software delivery.
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Service Health: By sharing the data model with IT Service Management and IT Operations Management, ServiceNow DevOps enables more efficient troubleshooting.
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DevOps Agile team planning: DevOps Agile team planning simplifies the planning methodologies and management by synchronizing action items with development. Further, it helps in agile planning from one place and prioritizes work for all the teams.
That's it for now!!!! For in-depth knowledge on ServiceNow DevOps, please have a look at the release notes and ServiceNow Documentations.
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ServiceNow DevOps Playbook
Thanks for reading and do comment with your suggestion and improvements. I will be adding few more blogs on ServiceNow DevOps Benefits, installation, and connecting DevOps tools with ServiceNow.
Hope you will find it helpful. Feel free to bookmark this post or mark it helpful.
Cheers,
Abhishek Gardade
Consultant at T-Systems ICT India Pvt. Ltd.
