Discovery & ServiceWatch & Fuji release

[aleck_lin]

Many of you have probably heard about the recent acquisition of ServiceWatch (SW) from Neebula. See our press release here.

As someone who had been in development and worked on Discovery for a long time, I'm actually quite excited about ServiceWatch and what it brings to the over ITOM offerings. For many years, one of my biggest challenges is to enhance the application dependency mapping (ADM) feature in Discovery so that automatic mapping between applications become easier to use. To accomplish this, we have invested a great deal of efforts into not only finding relationships between applications we know, but also finding relationships between applications that we don't knows (Pending classifier/process classifier feature). The last thing left to do is really about tying the these CIs together to business services and fill in some gaps that are not discoverable.

So how is Discovery different from ServiceWatch?

Well, ServiceWatch leverages a unique top-down approach to discover business services and all the CIs that are relevant to those business services. In other words, you start with critical business services that you care about and ServiceWatch will find you only the components within those business services. I like to think of it this way… Discovery finds you stuff you probably don't know whereas ServiceWatch finds you stuff that you already kinda know.

Discovery starts with a list of IP addresses and builds all the relationships there. it's great at finding CIs that you might or might not already know. It's great for asset inventory, but it also is great for finding all the possible relationships between them. The only problem is wading through the pool of information; which might take a while to build up the business service maps. ServiceWatch, on the other hand, asks you ahead of time what you think your services look like and builds very targeted maps, so you typically would get a subset of information in your environment; which is fine because you probably don't care about CIs that are not within the context of a business service. Therefore, these two tools complement each other quite well in bringing different kinds of data to the CMDB.

Why is ServiceWatch a big deal?

ServiceWatch is all about business service mapping. It provides the means to other ends such as service assurance (events & RCA analysis) and service delivery (cloud & config automation). Having a service map will provide the clarity to any business that is serious about understanding the impact of their CIs and providing the uptime to the level of five 9s. It is no wonder it's the forefront of our ITOM offering.

Where is ServiceWatch and Discovery headed together in the future?

For the Fuji release, ServiceWatch is still a stand-alone offering (outside of the ServiceNow platform) with integrations to ServiceNow instances. However, in our Geneva release, it is expected to be integrated into the ServiceNow platform to provide a much more seamless and unified experience. The two tools will leverage data from each other and provides a much richer feature set.

Interested in more information? Feel free to reach out to your local sales folks and solution consultants for a detailed demo; or you could contact me and I will connect you with the right folks!