Got ITSM Pro? Have you tried connecting to the world of DevOps yet?

[Richard91]

If you didn’t already know, we added DevOps Change Velocity to your ITSM Pro package around a year ago. With the Tokyo release, we’ve extended ITSM Pro with one more offering, DevOps Config. This extends our automated policy-driven governance to prevent risky configuration changes from causing problems in production. Check out DevOps Change Velocity and DevOps Config in the store – if you have ITSM Pro (or Enterprise) then you are already entitled to use them!

Here's a little more about each application:

DevOps Change Velocity solves the problem of developers spending too much time in governance and administrative tasks. It connects to the DevOps toolchains you are already using and captures information from every step, from planning and defects, to test and security scan results, to artifacts. We can then use this information in two crucial ways:

1. To inform and automate the change process. Start by easily connecting DevOps data to your existing change process to ensure change managers have everything they need to process the change. Then, with small changes to the pipeline, we can use the gathered data to completely automate the change process. Developers will not have to log in to ServiceNow to create change tickets – they are created automatically! We can even define change policies that use the gathered data to automatically approve the change requests too. Now you have a fully automated change process working at DevOps speed.
2. To provide a detailed audit trail of what changed and why. If something happens to the code in production everything that happened in the DevOps toolchain is captured and linked from the change record. We can find out what kicked off the change (defect, user story etc.), the results of tests that were run, the security scans from tools like SonarQube, and the Artifacts for build and release pipelines. You can go deep into this data and understand flow metrics and other details with DevOps Insights.

DevOps Config helps to eliminate the major remaining cause of outages and security exposures – improper configuration changes. It centralizes access to all kinds of configuration objects from applications (feature toggles, database strings etc.), releases (versions, build numbers, etc.), environments (dev, test, prod, geo etc.), and infrastructure.  Now we can add role-based access controls to configuration changes, preventing just anyone from going into a text file and making updates. We also add policies to validate the changes before we allow the DevOps pipeline to continue. This way we can prevent unwanted changes, for example by specifying valid port ranges. Or we can ensure a certain change takes place, like changing a database configuration string between test and production. Finally, the data that we gather can be added to what we do in DevOps Change Velocity, both to enhance automated change policy, and to provide more information about what changed for problem determination and auditing.

Both of these are included as a part of your ITSM Pro license. Both aim to help developers stay in their tools to be more productive. To get started, please check out the following two videos. The first walks you through the end-to-end implementation journey. The second introduces you to the new DevOps Change Velocity Workspace and how you can use it to set up integrations between ServiceNow and the tools in your DevOps toolchain - it's easy to get started!

DevOps Adoption Journey Overview

Configuring ServiceNow’s DevOps Integration