Data Center Management...

[ChrisPope]

How do you manage your data centers? Giving the mixture of Cloud approaches with Public, Private, Hybrid and consuming SaaS applications/services, the matrix is even more complex now.

Managing and understanding the services you have, who or how they are delivered is critical to a successful IT organization.

I would really like to hear from the community on what they do, how they do it, what tools they use and so on,

Chris

[kchorny]

One of our pain points was broadcast notifications for both outages and maintenance.   I think we've conquered that beast in a way that keeps the process simple, accountable and as free from human error as can be expected.   I would be happy to share the details if anyone is interested.

I'd also like to hear from others on how they've tackled other obstacles.   We are nearing the end of our first year using SNow in a DC/Managed Services environment, and some vision of how a mature product looks when you tie it all together would be very helpful.

For example, one of our pain points is customer circuits.   We provide internet through blended providers, and we will also order point to point circuits for our customers terminating in our data center.   On top of that, we allow them to order their own circuits and cross connect them into their cabinets.   Keeping track of all of that (who owns it, which vendor provides it, who supports it, how do you contact the vendor, how do you identify the problem circuit, how is the customer impacted, etc) in a useable format for the NOC staff has been difficult at best.

I'm sure there are other SNow customers in similar situations....?   Have you come up with a design that works?   Is there anyone who'd like to collaborate on solutions?

[dline]

Karla,

I would love for you to share. We are just finishing up standing up Asset, Configuration, Stockroom management and now that the engineers are seeing this, they are beginning to ask more questions about capabilities.Questions like can we use SN to tell how much amperage/wattage a particular rack is utilizing. Can we use data to draw a rack elevation diagram to show all components in the rack. Is there a way to show an entire data center to show our hot and cold flows and see where/if we have some devices installed incorrectly? Does the airflow of a particular device allow us to install it in this particular row of racks given our hot/cold isles?

Thanks in advance,

Doug Line

[kchorny]

Our standard answer to those types of questions is "Yes, we can probably do that, it just depends on how much money and/or resources you want to put towards those efforts".   It's funny how, as ServiceNow gets more exposure across the company, people start having more ideas about how to use it... and more misconceptions about the priority of their requests.  

Here are the components of our broadcast/maintenance notifications.   I'm not including much in the way of details, but maybe you can fill in the blanks.   If not, let me know and I'll help with that.  

1. Table u_incident_broadcast_notifications
2. Form layout for u_incident_broadcast_notifications
   1. This determines what is shown in the popup window.
   2. View: servicedisruption
   3. UI Policy Show End Time Field [INV] controls when the End Time field is exposed
3. Choice Lists for table u_incident_broadcast_notifications
4. UI Actions
   1. Send Broadcast Notification (Form Link on the Incident table)
      1. Adds link to qualified incidents
      2. Link opens the form (#2 above)
   2. Send Broadcast Notification (Form Button on the u_incident_broadcast_notificat table)
      1. Triggers event based on Choice (#3 above)
   3. Send Planned Outage Notification (Form Link on the Change Task table)
      1. Adds link to qualified change communication tasks
   4. Send Planned Outage Notification (Form Button on the u_manual_notifications table)
      1. Triggers event based on Choice (#3 above)
5. Inbound Email Actions
   1. Create Ticket from Reply to Chg Notice
   2. Create Ticket from Reply to Otg Notice
6. Dependent on Business Services being defined and populated with Contracted Companies
   1. The BCC field on the notification is populated via a mail script in the notification "What it will contain" section.   The script finds all of the companies contracted to the business service,   then finds all of the users in those companies who have Maintenance Notifications set to True.   A slush bucket for Contracted Companies was added to the Business Services table for this purpose.
7. Registered events, triggered by UI buttons.
8. A whole slew of Notification templates triggered by events and specific choices..

[Tejin]

HI @kchorny , thank you for sharing the valuable information. I would like to know your outages and maintenance process implemented in SNOW. We also have a similar situation where the whole datacenter was affected. How do you tackle these kind of scenario in ServiceNow ? Please update. Thank you