Announcing ServiceNow Agent Client Collector (ACC) starting with Monitoring

[Gerard Berthet]

Announcing ServiceNow Agent Client Collector (ACC) starting with Monitoring
Supporting today’s dynamic IT environments
November 30, 2020
Lisa Wolfe

For IT to pivot with speed when the next inevitable change hits – whether its on the scale of a pandemic or just a garden variety outage – requires automation. The days of configuring and maintaining traditional monitoring tools will no longer cut it with today’s dynamic IT environments. It’s not just adding new elements to monitor that are a drain on the IT teams time and resources, it’s about the need to continually have to manually tune how the infrastructure and applications are monitored – from tuning existing metric thresholds, to configuring monitoring on new hardware and software being installed and processing new types of events as more is learned about the behavior of the infrastructure and applications.

And, because traditional stand alone monitoring tools have no visibility of the service infrastructure lifecycle, they cannot adjust automatically to service related lifecycle status changes such as an IT component being put into production or taken out of service.

Manual processes not only take time but we all know they also introduce human error. With ServiceNow’s Agent Client Collector (ACC) for monitoring time-consuming manual agent configuration is replaced with flexible and centrally administered monitoring policies that automatically adjust based on CI type, status and as new physical or virtual machines are added and applications, databases and middleware are discovered on these machines.

ServiceNow ACC is an extensible agent-based monitoring solution that runs natively on the Now Platform and leverages ServiceNow’s rich operational data to drastically simplify manual monitoring setup and ongoing maintenance. Unlike point monitoring tools, ACC handles both events and metrics further reducing complexity. It is lightweight, scalable and highly secure. When it comes to security ACC was designed to meet the most stringent security requirements and agents encrypt data at rest and communicate with ServiceNow over encrypted links – without the need to open up firewalls or store credentials in ServiceNow.

ACC can be used as a complete monitoring solution in conjunction with a customer’s existing monitoring tools.

Customer Feedback:

“The bottom line is the *value* from Perspecta’ view point that they get from ACC is: greater quality, flexibility and efficiency (time savings)”, Scott Price from Perspecta said:
“ACC gives us more of an integrated way to do our monitoring, the fewer systems we have to login to the better, the less we are doing manually the better. This also takes one step out of the mix – for example before: SolarWinds was correlating the data, now that raw data is being passed directly to ServiceNow ACC. With the agent being on the server itself this gives us higher quality response and opens the door for us to get more accurate information. We also have the ability to visualize the overall performance of the data – for example: we have a client who is an application developer and they were complaining about the performance of their systems and we could see using the visualization from ACC they grabbed all the memory and their memory was trashing.”

Upcoming capabilities:
ACC provides a framework shared across ServiceNow products, the first one being ITOM Health for monitoring. Early next year the Agent capabilities will extend to Discovery to more fully and accurately populate a CMDB and be compliant with ServiceNow’s Common Service Data Model. Help Desk will be able to seamlessly retrieve or modify information on the target device where the agent resides, Operations will collect software usage on the target device and SecOps will be able to keep up with vulnerabilities and incidents in real time. Operations teams will also be able to automate remediation via workflows accessing the Agent directly. Log ingestion will be included in the second half to ingest infrastructure and application logs to further enhance ServiceNow AIOps capabilities.

Learn More:
Agent Client Collector Data Sheet:
https://servicenow.highspot.com/items/5f46e7ffa2e3a97274a570be?lfrm=srp.0

Agent Client Collector FAQ:
https://servicenow.highspot.com/items/5f46a8f2a2e3a97288a28497?lfrm=srp.0