Perhaps because I work in product marketing, I tend to see examples of other industries remaking their products everywhere I go. The second half of 2024 brings a new crop of 2025 automobile models to my social media feeds. Most new car models include modest enhancements to refresh the driving experience while keeping the looks stylishly updated. Seldom does a carmaker so completely change its new models as to deserve the moniker "revolutionary" or "groundbreaking."
Two rare exceptions in my memory were the 2005 Ford Mustang and the 2018 Toyota Camry. Each reboot actually lived up to the hype. The 2005 Mustang's redesign returned a classic muscle car aesthetic while introducing a modern platform that improved handling and stability, thanks to a more advanced suspension and a 4.6-liter V8 engine. Similarly, the 2018 Camry received a bold, sportier design built on Toyota's new TNGA platform, which lowered its center of gravity and increased chassis rigidity for better driving dynamics.
With advancements in Generative AI, Enterprise IT will change more radically in the next two years than many other industries have in the last twenty--perhaps even more than the perpetually innovative auto industry. ServiceNow's AIOps is no exception, of course, it is a flagship for what our traditional AI (such as our ML Based Service Mapping) can do when paired with Generative AI. Because we are the AI Platform for Business Transformation, we can't afford to make superficial updates and minor tweaks. The Xanadu release of AIOps is that rare redesign that does change everything. It is our 2005 Mustang and 2018 Camry rolled into one.
Let’s explore three feature sets that are setting new standards in IT Operations: Automated Alert Context in the AIOps Experience, Link View on Express List, and Now Assist Alert Analysis with Incident Population.
1. Automated Alert Context: Streamlined Alert Management
In large-scale IT environments, the sheer volume of alerts can be overwhelming, particularly when the organization is still developing its Configuration Management Database (CMDB). ServiceNow’s Automated Alert Context features are designed to simplify this complexity by grouping, enriching, and escalating alerts to provide actionable insights in weeks, not years.
Key Benefits:
- Enriched Alerts from Day One: Automated Alert Context uses tags, alert text, and configuration data to build rich contextual information around alerts, even without a mature CMDB. This enables IT teams to quickly identify and prioritize critical issues, process enriched alert groups, and systematically ignore irrelevant and noisy events.
- Intuitive Grouping and Escalation: alert automation allows for the intuitive grouping of issues based on common fields or patterns, reducing noise and ensuring that the most pressing alerts are escalated appropriately. It allows future groupings to be simulated based on past alerts so that operations are fine-tuned to changing technologies and conditions. A well-tuned process allows teams to respond swiftly and effectively to relevant alert groups, whether on the platform or in 3rd party apps.
- Improved Incident Response Times: By providing a clear, enriched picture of grouped issues and anomalies, Automated Alert Context helps reduce the time needed to diagnose and resolve incidents, leading to better service uptime and customer satisfaction.
Requirements:
- AIOps Experience Store Application
- Washington Patch 4 or Xanadu Release
2. Boost situational awareness with direct access to the Link View, Unified Map, and Metric Explorer. Plus, action hundreds of alerts directly from the Express list.
Understanding the blast radius of alerts is crucial for effective incident management. Our engineers are filling every centimeter of screen space with rich, relevant detail drawn from clearer and more comprehensive context. They are also making those lists more actionable. In Xanadu, ITOM users can access several key new visualizations that dramatically increase their situational awareness. These include (1) the simple but mighty Link View on the Express List, providing agents or operators with an instant visual map of alert relationships based on tags, alerts, and/or CMDB relationships. (2) direct access to the Unified Map of the CMDB makes it easier to understand how different alerts are connected and their potential impact on the IT environment. (3) bulk actions that can be taken on up to a thousand alerts at once from the improved Express List.
Key Benefits:
- Impact Visualization with Tag-Based Maps: The Link View feature allows IT teams to see the "blast radius" of alerts through an intuitive map visualization. This visual approach helps teams quickly grasp the relationships between alerts and their dependencies on other technology elements, even in environments without a fully mature CMDB.
- Faster Incident Resolution: By providing a clear visual representation of alert impacts, Link View enables teams to diagnose and resolve incidents more quickly, reducing downtime and improving service continuity.
- Seamless Integration:, Link View can be easily activated through the Express List application, making it a versatile addition to your ITOM toolkit.
- Action alerts in Bulk: reduce clicks and increase efficiency by closing, acknowledging, assigning up to a thousand filtered alerts from the Express List.
Included in the ITOM Visibility Professional or AI Operations Enterprise packages, these visualizations give superpowers to any IT operations manager, network administrator, or service desk team.
Requirements:
- Express List on the Service Operations Workspace from the ServiceNow Store
- Washington Patch 4 or Xanadu release
3. Now Assist Alert Analysis with incident population: generative AI-enabled clarity for the duration of the issue
While IT environments grow increasingly complex, more business stakeholders and technical teams need the clean, accurate, and simple story behind inevitable issues. Absent AI, operations teams can struggle to find that clarity amid jargon-laden alerts and arbitrary groupings at the event's inception. Now. Assist for ITOM analysis cuts through the haze and enables Operations teams to triage and address issues before they become outages.
The AI horsepower that clarifies and contextualizes alerts and alert groups can be even more valuable to the teams responding to formal incidents and outages, of course. Third quarter and Xanadu store updates allow IT teams to automatically populate IT incidents with prior alert analysis, effecting a clean handoff between operations and service teams. Once in the Service Management realm, Now Assist for ITSM adds skills like summarization and Knowledge Base article creation. The Now Assist skills from both sides afford IT teams more powerful tools to diagnose and resolve issues with unprecedented speed and accuracy and then prevent future issues with coordinated action.
Key Benefits:
- AI-Driven Alert Enrichment: Generative AI analyzes alert data and provides natural language explanations, making it easier for operators and agents to understand and act on alerts. This feature also enhances alerts with potential remediation steps, turning even the most cryptic alerts into actionable tasks.
- Reduced Mean Time to Repair (MTTR): By providing step-by-step guidance for troubleshooting and resolving issues, this feature significantly reduces the time required to fix incidents, improving overall service performance.
- Improved Incident Management: With AI-driven insights, IT teams can predict and prevent potential issues, reducing the number of incidents and improving system uptime. This proactive approach enhances operational efficiency and improves customer satisfaction by reducing service disruptions.
Now Assist Alert Analysis with Incident Population is part of the ITOM Pro Plus or ITOM AIOps Enterprise Plus packages, and it requires the new Now Assist for ITOM SKU.
Requirements:
- Now Assist for ITOM store App
- Washington DC Patch 4 or Xanadu
The re-imagination of AIOps coming to full fruition after more than two years in Xanadu is more than just a collection of miscellaneous features, just as the pivotal reboots of those car models were about more than improved heads-up displays or more cupholders. This redesign is fundamental--comprehensively and strategically designed from the ground up to give our customers the best operations management product in the business, bar none. Whether you’re looking to streamline alert management, visualize the full context of an operations issue, or harness best-in-class AI for truly intelligent operations, these features provide the necessary muscle to keep your dynamic IT operations humming like a new car. Coming soon, new car smell.
