We are pleased to introduce the latest innovations for ITOM Visibility in the Vancouver and third quarter store releases.
ServiceNow ITOM sets the standard in the bustling market of operations and monitoring tools, with its seamless interoperability, its robust platform, and its automated workflow. With the Vancouver family and associated store releases, we're upping the game with thoughtful out-of-the-box user experiences that match the power of the platform step-for-step. We are also pleased to announce even greater support for Kubernetes and cloud containers, enabling automated management of certificates and software in any environment.
From newly streamlined user interfaces you can harness increased productivity to eliminate outages caused by expired certificates. You can better manage your network and firewalls and you can manage software licenses on your organization’s Apple devices and Kubernetes.
The August introduction of a new Service Graph Connector for OpenTelemetry allows any ITOM Visibility customers to easily discover Kubernetes infrastructure and add it to their CMDB without significant setup. From that single trusted source of record, you have visibility to traditional data center devices, cloud instances, and containers all in one place to enable automated workflow across and between all of your technology estates.
Compelling User Experiences for Certificate Inventory Management and Firewall Audits and Reporting
ServiceNow Visibility already makes it easy to prevent internet outages by automating the discovery and renewal of TLS Certificates. A new workspace for Certificate Inventory and Management built on the ServiceNow Next Experience puts all of the functions of this powerful capability onto a single screen, greatly enhancing the user experience:
From this new Certificate Management workspace, you can view and action your Certificate Inventory along multiple dimensions: by expiration, by fingerprint algorithm, by priority, and more. Alternatively, pull up your certificates by task using a new dashboard enumerating renewal tasks, certificate request task, expirations, or automation trends.
In a new detailed dashboard purpose-built for certificate management, you can conveniently move between certificate information, automated certificate workflows, setup, as well as manual tasks. A handy link to the dependency view gives you quick access to the dependency view where you can find invaluable business and technical context.
Another ITOM Visibility capability getting a reinvigorated user experience is Firewall Audits and Reporting. From the new Firewall administration workspace, you can now review your firewall requests, audits, and devices from a streamlined and thoughtfully designed single screen.
A new firewall dashboard allows network administrators to stay on top of their firewall processes by monitoring the status of requests and tracking their on-time fulfillment. An audit dashboard accessible from the same workspace tracks outstanding audits and audit responses over time.
A firewall insights dashboard gives you a comprehensive overview of all policies including new and audited policies or those without an owner. Meanwhile, a view of firewall devices gives a visual representation of different manufacturers and models in your physical and virtual footprint.
As with the certificate management workspace, a detail-based dashboard of devices puts each firewall in context with its business and technical context. Handy links take you from your overall view to specific firewall records, rule requests, and audits.
Both workspaces are available with a Visibility license and require the August 2023 release of the Certificate Inventory and Management store app.
Expanded Scope for Certificate and Software Management
Not only will installing the August store release of Certificate Inventory and Management enable enhanced modern interfaces for Certificate Management, it will also enable you to create Certificate Objects and automate certificate tasks directly from the Kubernetes cluster.
Managing software and licenses in Kubernetes clusters can be daunting. The dynamic and ephemeral nature of containers, in combination with a lack of visibility to where and how often software is being used would make it difficult to manage even if there were clear lines between license types, components that make up a software product, or commercial and open-source elements. There are not.
ServiceNow is here to help. Beginning with the August release of the Discovery and Service Mapping patterns store app, you can now generate a Software Bill of Materials or SBOM of your containerized environments. This not only helps you comply with a dizzying array of new software supply chain regulatory requirements issued by agencies like the U.S. Federal government and the EU, but the new capability also allows you to address traditional use cases like ensuring software license compliance and addressing security vulnerabilities inside containers.
You can significantly reduce your organization’s software license expenditures by reclaiming licenses that are no longer being used. This is especially true of multimedia and editing applications used by creative workers on Apple devices. But determining which applications are being used requires software metering which has been challenging to implement, particularly for the MacOS.
The Agent Client Collector for Visibility (ACC-V) now supports software usage metering on macOS devices. With detailed records of which users are using expensive software licenses, you can reduce license expenditures and get key insights to set your software and application strategies.
A cloud-native method to discover Kubernetes applications and microservices
ServiceNow customers use containerized environments to ensure scalability, portability, efficiency, and deployment speed. The benefits of this approach are multiplied when applications are deployed using cloud-native deployment approaches.
ServiceNow already supports multiple methods to discover Container architecture. These include agentless Discovery and Service Mapping patterns--which include Kubernetes patterns; automated Kubernetes discovery scheduling; and Cloud Native Operations for Visibility. The new Service Graph Connector for OpenTelemetry (SGC for OTel) has the advantage of being a Cloud Native solution. It bypasses the setup of schedules and permissions and takes full advantage of telemetry to import clusters, workloads, nodes, and other elements directly into the platform. It allows companies to calculate application services using trace data. Any visibility customer interested in discovering their Kubernetes has access to the SGC for OTel without additional licensing to populate cloud native configuration items including:
- Clusters
- Namespaces
- Workloads
- Nodes
- Pods
- Containers
- Services
It’s time to unify the vast—and fractured—technology estate that many enterprises maintain. You can manage it all through a single environment: the Now Platform
Customers who rely on microservices and Kubernetes for critical applications and customers who do active development operations on the cloud should consider full ITOM Enterprise and Cloud Observability licenses. Having the full power of both applications will allow them to deploy the connector not only to populate CMDB data, but also to incorporate event management and health logs, enabling them to use AI to predict and prevent outages and ensure the healthy operation of all applications hosted on discovered Kubernetes.
We’ve only had space to discuss the major innovations coming in the Vancouver release. Check out some of the minor Visibility enhancements that make patterns more intuitive, agents more robust, and that give you a user interface to deploy and manage your MID Servers that is both more modern and more versatile.
(For the Service Mapping workspace, see the Service Mapping Plus application on the store.)
Check back here soon when will be highlighting yet more innovations in Artificial Intelligence, including Generative AI, that will enable even more exciting business outcomes.
