Authored by: Brian Emerson, Senior Director Product Management—IT Operations Management
Drive better operations through complete visibility of your operations estate
Let's face it—the world is getting cloudy. And that is a great thing! According to Forrester Research, the global public cloud market will reach $178 billion this year, u..., crossing over 50% for the first time ever. This means more and more applications teams within the enterprise are ramping up use of cloud resources to deliver great customer experiences with rapid levels of innovation. In fact, a recent report from McKinsey&Company this year states that most organizations will look to move mos.... However, with rapid adoption of cloud comes a realization that needing to understand how cloud is being used across the organization is becoming even more critical. Over this 3-part blog series, we will be discussing three important areas to keep in mind to drive great customer experience through excellence in IT operations.
- Visibility—a complete view and understanding of your operations estate (hardware, software virtualized resources, cloud services, etc.) across both on-premises and in your cloud providers
- Health—ensure that your IT operations are healthy, and that you can understand, visualize, track the impact to users and easily maintain business continuity across the services delivered by your organization at economies of scale
- Optimization—gain insights into continual service improvements through the understanding provided by Visibility and Health, that hep you drive better decisions to increase service agility and improve operational efficiencies across your hybrid cloud world
Part 1: Let’s start with visibility, which focuses on three core capabilities:
- Gaining real-time visibility into enterprise infrastructure and services
- Leveraging business-aware views to drive better decisions across IT and the business
- Ensuring data integrity and configuration consistency across your operations estate
Gaining real-time visibility into enterprise infrastructure and services
Driving real-time visibility starts with understanding your operational landscape. There are many potential data sources available to help you identify and map your environment (see Figure 1). At ServiceNow, we have the ability to both discover and map your services in context to the applications they support. Our ultimate goal is to bring all of these sources together to provide the most accurate, real-time view of your business services. We call this our business-aware data layer. This layer allows operational decisions to be made in context to the business.
(Figure 1)
This is invaluable for critical operational processes. Imagine a call comes in that a critical service is down. You can immediately understand everything tied to that service and quickly identify where to focus troubleshooting efforts. Or imagine you need to upgrade a server. Now you’ll know which applications are utilizing that server (perhaps it is a message queue used by dozens of applications) and can identify the overall impact of running the upgrade.
One thing you will notice here is that cloud resources are just one element to the complete picture that makes up your operations estate. Cloud can’t be a one-off, but rather thought of as completely integrated into a single, end-to-end view of your environment.
Leveraging business-aware views to drive better decisions across IT and the business
So why does this business-aware data layer even matter? Well, it is critical for not only optimizing how you do operations, but also providing a lens that helps the rest of the organization make better decisions. For example:
- Security: if a critical vulnerability is discovered, how can you quickly understand which of your business services could be impacted? …or…
- Financial management: being able understand how infrastructure and software license costs map to applications can help you drive much better alignment of IT resources to outcomes you are driving within the business. In this case, it could be trying to optimize costs of the cloud resources supporting your mobile payments application.
(Figure 2)
Business context also helps you prioritize relative importance when issues in the environment do occur—which issues should be prioritized first, which problems are resulting in lost revenue for the company? Understanding business impact allows you to drive efficiencies across multiple business and IT functions within your organization. ServiceNow is able to bring this together based on our integrated platform and a single source of truth that all our applications can leverage.
Ensuring data integrity and configuration consistency across your operations estate
To make this business-aware data layer valuable, it can’t be a point-in-time view of your environment. At ServiceNow, we store all configuration data into our Configuration Management Database (CMDB). Often times, I believe the “CM” part of CMDB is missing from the conversation when organizations embark on building a single source-of-truth database. The entire goal of CMDB is to help drive excellence in how you manage the configurations of your IT assets and how they support your mission critical applications. To get this right, the system must continuously monitor for configuration changes and drifts that constantly occur and compare them with known gold standards or baselines. This allows you to understand when drift was expected (i.e. there was a known change) versus unexpected (i.e. unplanned). When unplanned changes do occur, the system can help identify what changed and also help drive remediation actions to bring things back to the correct state.
(Figure 3)
While we will continue to drive deeper into these topics over this series, one of the most important things to take away is that when it comes to visibility, your cloud resources are a critical part of the complete picture. Being able to aggregate and correlate how cloud is being used to drive business outcomes allows operations to play a critical role in accelerating the business, not just supporting it.
Remember to check out part 2 in our series; and keep on the lookout for an upcoming live webinar where we'll diver deeper into the full lifecycle of the cloud ecosystem. Registration links available here.
