Please, No More Bridge Calls!
Every operations team knows this scenario:
A critical service incident occurs, triggering a 20-person bridge call, and then...
> The cloud infrastructure team reports all systems are green in their monitoring tool.
> And network operations uses their own tool to confirm DNS is functioning normally.
> And the tool that application development uses confirms they haven't deployed changes in a week.
Meanwhile, customers are experiencing service disruptions, and no single team has complete visibility into the symptoms, let alone the root cause.
This fundamental disconnect has challenged IT operations for years. Specialized teams operate within their own monitoring silos while central operators carry responsibility without adequate context. The lack of unified visibility creates significant inefficiencies in incident response.
The Service Observability overview dashboard showing health metrics and recent changes from ITSM
Introducing Service Observability
Service Observability in ITOM addresses this challenge by bringing together critical signals from existing monitoring tools into unified, service-centric views. Rather than requiring tool or data consolidation, it leverages a company's current (often diverse) technology investments while solving the visibility problem.
The core value proposition is straightforward: Enable centralized operators to effectively triage and route issues without requiring expertise in every monitoring tool across the organization. By importing metrics from a growing list of tools including Datadog, Splunk Observability, New Relic, and Dynatrace directly into service-aware dashboards, operators can view comprehensive service health—from application runtime to infrastructure to database performance—in a single interface. You can even use metrics from your own ACC agents, or any other metrics stored in MetricBase.
We also bring valuable insight from across your CMDB together alongside these signals. The new Service Overview page has charts for recent changes, open alerts + incidents, and SLO information for each service as well as the infrastructure that runs it. It's the best first place for an operator to visit when they're triaging and investigating a service incident.
Recent Enhancements: Customization and Expanded Integrations
Based on customer feedback, we've significantly expanded Service Observability capabilities since the initial release in Yokohama.
Customizable Dashboards
Operators can now tailor Service Observability dashboards to their specific requirements. They can also essentially copy and paste their favorite charts from third party tools directly into Service Observability.
Comprehensive Integration Ecosystem
Our integration portfolio now includes:
- SolarWinds
- Azure Monitor
- AWS CloudWatch
- Splunk Observability
- Datadog
- Dynatrace
- New Relic
Native Metrics Through Metricbase
Organizations to leverage metrics already stored in ServiceNow's Metricbase, like those from the Agent Client Collector for Monitoring. This capability enables teams to correlate business metrics, synthetic monitoring results, or custom KPIs directly with technical observability data within unified views.
Practical Impact: From Reactive to Proactive Operations
We hope we can extend beyond consolidated signals and dashboards and fundamentally transform operational workflows:
- Accelerated Triage: Operators can quickly identify whether issues stem from infrastructure, application, or database layers without switching between tools
- Targeted Escalation: With complete context, operators engage the appropriate subject matter expert immediately rather than involving all teams simultaneously
- Reduced MTTR: Unified views decrease time spent correlating data across tools, allowing teams to focus on resolution
- Preserved Specialization: Domain teams maintain their specialized tools while operations gains necessary visibility
Service Observability is available now in the ServiceNow platform. For technical details and implementation guidance, please consult our documentation, contact your account team, or leave a comment below!
