ServiceNow’s Agent Client Collector (ACC) gets you that much closer
When I think about the value you can achieve with Agent Client Collector (ACC), I can’t help but smile from ear to ear. Gone are the days when ACC was just for ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM). ACC is an extension of the ServiceNow platform that automates workflows across multiple technology functions directly on your endpoints – end-user computing devices and servers. In today’s work from anywhere world automating everything is the key to moving at the speed of digital and keeping your employees and customers satisfied.
ACC’s original use cases were aligned with the ITOM functions of monitoring and discovery. ServiceNow product teams have been hard at work building ACC solutions for additional use cases, and I’m thrilled to announce there are ACC solutions for IT Service Management (ITSM), IT Asset Management (ITAM), and Security Operations (SecOps). With the release of these new capabilities, ACC further enables you to reduce the agent footprint across your organization and get closer to your goal of automating everything.
As of February 2022, ACC provides the following capabilities:
Visibility:
Visibility of your entire estate across on-premises, cloud, and endpoints is the key to technology service operations excellence. Without a trustworthy CMDB, you will lack the ability to make data-driven decisions across technology functions and your automation capabilities will be diminished. When it comes to discovering resources, there are times when using an agent is the preferred method. Example use cases where agent-based discovery is needed are:
- End-user computing (which demands push-based and event-driven discovery)
- IPv6 enabled compute (where the scanning of IPv6 network becomes challenging with port scans)
- Autoscaling and / or hibernation of cloud and microservice resources
- Challenges with obtaining credentials
- Micro segmentation in cloud
- Air-gapped networks
ACC solves all these challenges with Agent Client Collector for Visibility (ACC-V), where the technology offers a push-based discovery method to collect inventory data to populate the CMDB. ACC-V supports the discovery of Windows, Linux, and macOS systems, and is the foundation for all ACC capabilities described in this blog. With ACC-V as the foundation, your IT staff will be able to increase automation, gain real-time visibility into configuration data, and fill visibility gaps.
Predictive AIOps:
When it comes to technology service operations, predictive AIOps capabilities are critical to ensuring your services remain available and are performing optimally. Siloed service operations can no longer keep pace with the technology demands of today’s digital-first world. ACC enables monitoring of events and metrics with Agent Client Collector for Monitoring (ACC-M) for Windows and Linux systems so that you can detect what has occurred and identify anomalous behavior with performance. Taking it a step further, ACC enables streaming of logs from Windows systems with Agent Client Collector Log Analytics (ACC-L) to identify anomalous behavior found in logs which are leading indicators of imminent issues. Using these agent capabilities together provides a holistic solution that Service Operations staff will love. You will be able to reduce mean time to resolve (MTTR) for service operations incidents and increase productivity for your agents and employees.
Remediation Playbooks:
When common application issues occur on endpoints, IT support staff need to perform manual steps to resolve them. This takes away time from focusing on more important issues. ACC enables monitoring of common issues for endpoint applications (the initial use case is Zscaler) and auto-remediates them without human intervention through Remediation Playbooks. All auto-remediation actions generate incident tickets for tracking; however, they are immediately closed when auto-remediation is successful. Your employees will save hours here and be happier and more productive, and your IT staff will be able to focus on higher-value work.
Live CI View:
When endpoint system issues occur, IT support staff need to perform a remote desktop session to view real-time system information. This increases MTTR for these issues. ACC enables the gathering of real-time system performance information from within Incident records through Live CI View. Real-time system information collected from ACC can be used by your IT support staff to investigate the root cause and make decisions on the best course of action for resolution. And here again, your employees will be happier and more productive, and your IT staff will be able to reduce incident MTTR.
Virtual Agent Conversations
Did you know that one of the top requests submitted to ServiceNow instances across customers is the need for local admin access? The biggest use case for this request is for the ability to install software on end-user computers. ACC works seamlessly together with the ServiceNow ITSM Virtual Agent Conversations to automate fulfillment of this request within minutes on computers running macOS. Yes, you heard this one before and it cannot be said enough your employees will be happier and more productive, and your IT staff will be able to focus on higher-value work.
Software Asset Management
Software Asset managers need a complete picture of software usage data to create effective software license reclamation policies. To gain a complete picture, software usage metering is needed. ACC-V collects software usage metering data for Windows-based systems. Organizations migrating from Microsoft SCCM to Microsoft Intune have reported a lack of metering capabilities in Intune. The total software usage information collected from ACC-V can be used by Software Asset Management Pro to identify unused or lightly used software to be reclaimed. In addition to software metering data, ACC-V also collects the date software was last used for Windows systems. You will be able to realize savings from wasted software spend.
Security Incident Response
To investigate a security incident, security analysts require access to real-time system information for affected systems at their fingertips. To recover from a security incident, security analysts need the ability to execute actions against affected systems in real-time. ACC enables the gathering of real-time system information (services, processes, etc.) and the ability to execute actions directly on affected systems through Agent Client Collector for Security Incident Response. Real-time system information collected from ACC can be used by security analysts as another source of data to determine the best course of action for recovery. Automated recovery workflows can be executed directly to affected systems using the ACC. You will be able to reduce mean time to recover from Security Incidents and increase your security posture.
Now that you have a better understanding of how ACC can provide value to your organization, you can see how ACC gets you closer to automating everything and saving your employees countless hours.
ACC videos:
ACC-V overview
ACC-V deeper dive
ACC-M overview
ACC-M tech talk
ACC-M URL monitoring
ACC-M service monitoring
ACC-SIR overview
ACC VA Conversations overview
Automate Discovery of Log4j and enrich the Security Incidents with Agent Client Collector
Using ACC to automate software distribution
Looking to learn more about any of these ACC capabilities? Please leave a comment below.
