ServiceNow ITOM and Solarwinds SAM

[James Roberts]

Hi all

We have Solarwinds Server & Application Monitor and we are considering getting NPM in the future

We are also using ServiceNow for its helpdesk and are now looking to use it for CMDB, this brought us to Discovery and realised this was part of ITOM.

It looks like there is a fair bit of overlap in features for SolarWinds SAM and ServiceNow ITOM so wanted to get peoples opinion on whats the best approach. I can see a number of articles on people using solarwinds as a data source for CMDB but havent had so much success in finding why people decide to use both ServiceNOW ITOM and SolarWinds SAM.

Could some people share their experineces and highlight why we should use one over the other or why we should use both.

[Tony Branton]

Hi James,

SolarWinds provide some nice tools for monitoring IT infrastructure and applications and include some discovery capabilities.  Organizations who have integrated SolarWinds with ServiceNow have typically done so for the following reasons:

• Noise reduction, i.e. effective deduplication, filtering and grouping to achieve significant reductions in incidents.  Organizations are achieving noise reduction ratios of better that 98% using Event Management.
• Consolidating events from SolarWinds and other monitoring tools on a single platform.
• Correlating alerts with CIs in the ServiceNow CMDB in order to relate incidents, change requests and other tasks.
• Correlating alerts with CIs supporting mapped application/business services enabling operations teams to understand while service(s) are impacted (service maps are automatically kept up to date by Service Mapping).
• Providing operators with the ability to rapidly identify changes to CIs and service topologies when triaging alerts.
• Correlating alerts from multiple monitoring tools to group alerts and - in conjunction with service maps - support automated root cause analysis.
• Analysing performance metrics to automatically model behaviour, identify normal bounds of operation and detect anomalies.
• Relating knowledge articles from Knowledgebases with alerts to offer operators with potential solutions or run-book instructions.
• Automating the creation of incidents and any other task type (e.g. Change Requests, Service Requests, Work Orders, etc) without the need for scripts.
• Automating remediation (i.e. corrective fixes) using the native orchestration platform service.

Consolidating events on the same platform as the CMDB and ITSM data provides enormous operational benefits and increases the situation awareness of operators, something that's difficult to achieve with standalone tools.

Hope this helps.

[Jeff Mayrand1]

These are two very different tools.  One provides the data (Solarwinds) one consolidates it into Alerts (ITOM Event Management).  We are prototyping the integration to ITOM now so I would be happy to answer questions based on our results.    The biggest thing is to make a decision on information flow and where the operations staff are going to process work.  

[James Roberts]

This is one of the things I am trying to clarify, what details is ServiceNow not capable of capturing with its discovery tools that SolarWinds SAM does?

It also appears that orchestration could take care of a lot of self healing/remedial tasks.

SolarWinds comes with a number of prebuilt monitors that servicenow does not out of the box but again not 100% sure.

let me know if I am just misunderstanding things.