Introducing Automation Discovery, find ITSM automation opportunities in your data fast! (Part 2)

[Lener Pacania1]

Welcome to Part 2 of a two-part series on Automation Discovery. In this article I’ll walk you through the installation and creation of your first Automation Discovery report. If you missed Part 1, read that first and come back here.

Installing Automation Discovery

To install Automation Discovery go to the ServiceNow store and search for Automation Discovery. You should see the below (Figure 1). Select Get/Request and fill in your instance details; once approved you will receive an e-mail with installation instructions. You can also install Automation Discovery from your plugin list, just make sure to go back to the store to review the system requirements as that’s not shared when you install via the plug-in.

Figure 1 – Automation Discovery Application in the store.

This is what my approval e-mail looked like from the ServiceNow store it has links to install instructions.

Figure 2 – Approval from ServiceNow store

Note: Orlando and Paris customers must perform the following instructions prior to using the app:

• • Search for "System Definition" in the Filter Navigator and select "Tables"
  • Search for "ml_capability_definition_base" under Name
  • Click on "Solution Definition" under Label
  • Click on the Application Access tab
  • Click on "Can Create" and "Can Update"
  • Click on the "Update" button

Creating your first Automation Discovery Report

1. Go to Filter Navigator > Automation Discovery > Discovery Reports
2. Click New Report

Figure 3 – Create a new report  

3. Fill out the Automation Discovery report definition form, you’ll notice we fill out some of these fields by default (see Figure 4). The Data source (1) represents the table you wish to analyze; the default is Incident. The Filter By (2) constrains the data set from the table that you want to run machine learning against. The Fields to Analyze (3) can be any string column; the default is Short description.

Figure 4 – Fill out the first three fields

4. What makes Automation Discovery unique is that we classify your incidents against a curated ITSM Taxonomy. Make sure ITSM is selected as the Taxonomy, this allows us to map your incidents to things we can potential automate in the platform. For example all variations of password resets requests such as help password broken, Unable to login, Outlook password issue, Ping reset Password, MSFT AD reset, Okta Reset Password will fall under the ITSM - Request - Data - User - Account - Reset Password automation opportunity category.

5. Make sure the cluster unmapped records to identify new automation opportunities to add is checked. This enables the Hierarchical DBScan algorithm to run and cluster patterns of incidents that do not map to our ITSM Taxonomy. This is helpful to see patterns for specific application issues such as SAP CRM, Oracle, Workday, or Epic issues.

6. In Figure 5, you can set the frequency of how often the report refreshes (1) and also specify the recipient list. The recipients have to be users defined in the platform (2). If you have users who need to see the report that are outside of ServiceNow you can print the report to PDF, just make sure to select the “printer friendly” option in your settings. Also make sure to name your report something unique so you can easily find it (3)

Figure 5 – Setting frequency and the recipients. 

7. That’s it! Go ahead and click , in about 15minutes you’ll have a preview and in about 30 minutes you’ll have a full analysis. To learn how to interpret the report please refer to Part 1 of this series.

[Lener Pacania1]

Troubleshooting Tip

I've noticed that for Q+ instances the report creation will hang and eventually time out. Please check that you ml_capability_definition base table has the correct permissions by following the below instructions:

1. Search for "System Definition" in the Filter Navigator and select "Tables"
2. Search for "ml_capability_definition_base" under Name
3. Click on "Solution Definition" under Label
4. Click on the Application Access tab
5. Click on "Can Create" and "Can Update"
6. Click on the "Update" button

[rashmi2109]

We cannot dot walk in Field to Analyze

[Lener Pacania1]

We limit the fields that you can analyze with Automation Discovery and dot walking is not currently supported.  If you need to dot walk I would suggest leveraging clustering.  You will not get the nice categorization to an ITSM automation topic, but you can still identify patterns.

[rashmi2109]

My Reports are failing if i use sc_task table or sc_req_item table and works only for incident. 

[Lener Pacania1]

Are you within the min 10k records, max 100k records for sc_task? I just ran one and runs fine.

[timsabaumckean]

@Lener Pacania1 ,

There are instances where automation discovery's clustering of similar records isn't quite accurate. I can hide the recommendations where it's got the entire cluster wrong, but is there a way of amending a cluster to remove certain short description values so that we can get a more accurate representation of the cluster and what the automation potential is?

[Lener Pacania1]

Hi timsabaumckean, first off you are rocking that bow tie in your picture!

Regarding you question about the automation discovery clustering.  Have you tried the view more details link and then filtering the short description there to better understand what is under that ITSM taxonomy?

For example, I want to better understand an automation that I can build for the incidents identified under ITSM-Issue-Software-SAP.  I know I want to avoid "log" issues, as that is handled by something else.  So I click into the "view more details".

This gives me  a list view of all the incidents identified under ITSM-Issue-Software-SAP and I just filter out the "log" from the short description like so.

If you need more control you can create a predictive intelligence cluster model that just focuses on SAP issues and use clustering directly.  HTH -Lener

[timsabaumckean]

@Lener Pacania1 thank you, it's a photo from my Covid wedding 😁 I've raised this idea to improve automation discovery based off of your last response

[ggaytan]

Is Automation Discovery available for PDI?