Welcome to ITOM Visibility Season

[sremerson]

September is here which signifies the launch of some of my favorite things – the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) Drag Racing playoffs, pumpkin spice everything, and a plethora of ITOM Visibility solutions! Like an NHRA pit crew thrashing between rounds, our ITOM Visibility team has been working feverishly to deliver great experiences for you.

This is a busy month for ITOM Visibility as new capabilities were released in Rome, and in the Store. In this blog, I describe the top five solutions I’m most excited about.

Machine Learning (ML)-based Service Mapping enhancements
Are you using ML-based Service Mapping yet? If not, what are you waiting for? ServiceNow introduced ML-based Service Mapping in the Quebec release to help you create highly accurate service maps quickly. This capability uses machine learning to identify meaningful traffic-based connections and creates suggestions for you to add to service maps. However, you still needed to choose the appropriate connection suggestions to add to your service maps. The Rome release introduces automation capabilities via a policy-based rules engine to automatically add connection suggestions to service maps based on criteria you define. For example, you may decide that you want to add all high-confidence connection suggestions automatically to all service maps. Additionally, you may decide to automatically add connection suggestions listening on specific ports to a specific application service. For more information on using connection rules with Service Mapping, please see the documentation.

Automate certificate workflows
With the importance of TLS certificates to critical services, can you really afford to have one expire? Inevitably, every organization regardless of industry will have a certificate expire. In fact, this occurs four times per year on average and can lead to outages, increased security risk, security breaches, significant fines, negative press, and loss of customer trust. When it comes to renewing certificates, time is of the essence! With the September 2021 release of Certificate Inventory and Management, you can now automate certificate workflows to increase efficiency, reduce risk of human error, and ensure change management governance. The initial release of certificate workflow automation includes support for the DigiCert certificate authority (CA) and there are plans to add support for more CA partners in the future. Joint ITOM Visibility and DigiCert customers can install the latest Certificate Inventory and Management application (v1.3.8) in your ServiceNow instance and begin automating certificate workflows today. For more information on certificate workflow automation, please see this blog.

Deploy containerized MID servers
The MID Server is the gateway between ServiceNow and the devices on your network. Without it, you would not be able to automate ingestion of data or automate workflows to and from your environment. In today’s DevOps and cloud-first world, you are going to need the ability to deploy MID Servers rapidly to keep up with the ever-increasing demand for cloud and microservice resources. In the Rome release, the ability for MID Servers to be deployed in highly scalable container architectures is now available. This capability enables you to build MID Server images that can easily be deployed quickly when the need arises to support increased ServiceNow workloads, such as Discovery and IntegrationHub. After upgrading to Rome, you will be able to download and deploy Docker Recipes for Windows and Linux. For more information on containerized MID Servers, please see the documentation.

Discover more operating systems with Agent Client Collector for Visibility (ACC-V)
Do you have gaps in visibility? When it comes to discovering resources across your entire estate, there are times when using an agent is the preferred method. Example use cases where agent-based discovery is needed are:

• End user computing
• Autoscaling and / or hibernation of cloud and microservice resources
• Challenges with obtaining credentials

In April 2021, ServiceNow introduced the Agent Client Collector for Visibility (ACC-V) as part of a unified agent strategy with initial support for discovery of Windows and Linux. The unified agent strategy centers around the Agent Client Collector, which enables outcomes across IT workflows, including AIOps, security, software and hardware asset management and IT Service Management. With the September 2021 Store release for ACC-V, you can now discover MacOS, Amazon Linux 2 and Oracle Linux using agents. To begin discovering these operating systems via an agent, you can install the latest version of Agent Client Collector for Visibility (v1.3.0) in your instance. For more information on ACC-V, see the documentation.

Automate deployment of Agent Client Collector from ServiceNow
Speaking of Agent Client Collector, you are now able to automate installation of the agent on Windows and Linux operating systems from the ServiceNow platform. This is accomplished through the Agent Client Collector Spoke for IntegrationHub which automates the installation on remote systems through a workflow. To begin performing automated deployments of the agent to Windows and Linux operating systems from ServiceNow, you can install the latest version of the Agent Client Collector Spoke (v1.10) in your instance. For more information on the ACC Spoke, see the documentation.

When it comes to pumpkin spice, there are those of us who love it, and those who can’t stand it. When it comes to these great ITOM Visibility enhancements, I believe we can all agree they will provide tremendous value for you.

For a complete listing of what’s new in ITOM Visibility in September 2021, please review the following release notes:

Rome ITOM Visibility release notes
Rome Mid Server release notes
IT Operations Management store release notes
Certificate Inventory & Management store release notes
Agent Client Collector Framework store release notes
Agent Client Collector for Visibility store release notes
Agent Client Collector Spoke store release notes