Quick Start Guide for Alert Management in SOW

Daniela Kutryan · ‎08-03-2023

Welcome to ServiceNow® Service Operations Workspace for ITOM Health

If you are just starting your Alert and AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for Operations) Experience in Service Operations Workspace (SOW) journey, then you have come to the right place. This guide will help you get up to speed on activating and realizing value from SOW and is a great place to come back to as our products evolve over time.

Let’s get started!

Here is an overview of the topics we will cover in the guide:

AIOps Experience in SOW
What are the business outcomes you can expect?
What to know before getting started?
Steps to quick success
Other helpful resources

AIOps Experience in SOW

The AIOps Experience app is a transformative addition to the AIOps product in ServiceNow, revolutionizing the entire ITOM (IT Operations Management) Health user experience. This app introduces three powerful capabilities, namely the Express List, Integration Launchpad, and AIOps Dashboards, each delivering unique value, but when combined, they elevate the user experience to a whole new level. The AIOps Experience is the intended user experience for ITOM Health users. ITOM Health comes with many applications that let you transform how you operate services across the organization. But don’t worry! You don’t have to implement everything at once. Here are the key ITOM Health applications to focus on first:

Event Management: Event Management gathers alerts from infrastructure events captured by third-party monitoring tools. Event Management uses IT-related information gathered by Discovery to map alerts to configuration items. Based on the collected information, Event Management then provides dashboards showing a consolidated view of all service-impact events (product page) (configuration guide)
Agent Client Collector for Monitoring: Agent Client Collector Monitoring (ACC-M) enables you to monitor your service availability, examine the health and performance of your environment, and ensure that your infrastructure and its applications are running properly. (product page) (configuration guide)
Metric Intelligence: ServiceNow® Metric Intelligence provides the ability to capture, and then explore and analyze operational metrics data, identifying and indicating anomalies. Metric Intelligence generates anomaly alerts that can be promoted to IT alerts and appear on the Service Operations Workspace and service health dashboard. You can leverage this analysis to prevent potential service outages (product page) (configuration guide)
Health Log Analytics: ServiceNow® Health Log Analytics application predicts IT issues before they impact users. The application helps you solve problems faster by ingesting, understanding, and correlating machine-generated log data in real time. It notices any deviation from normal behavior when it happens and alerts you of possible business-impacting issues. Health Log Analytics receives and processes logs via the MID Server and sends events to the ServiceNow® Event Management application (product page) (configuration guide)
Service Operations Workspace for ITOM: ServiceNow® Service Operations Workspace is a configurable workspace that provides a unified experience for multiple IT Operations Management and IT Service Management workflows. Configure your experience using the easy-to-navigate interface of Service Operations Workspace (product page) (configuration guide).

ITOM Operator Pro applications include:

Discovery - Discovery finds applications and devices on your network and then updates the CMDB 360 with the information it finds
Service mapping - Discovers all application services in your organization and builds a comprehensive map
Certificate management - Discover and proactively manage all your TLS certificates
Firewall audit - Discover firewall security policies, devices, device groups, and manager information.
Service graph connectors - Import and integrate third-party data into CMDB classes and properties
Event management - Gathers alerts from infrastructure events captured by third-party monitoring tools
Agent client collector - Monitor and examine the health and performance of your environment.
Metric intelligence - Capture, and then explore and analyze operational metrics data, identifying and indicating anomalies.
Service operations workspace - configurable workspace that provides a unified experience for multiple IT Operations Management and IT Service Management workflows

and AIOps Enterprise adds

Health log analytics - Helps you solve problems faster by ingesting, understanding, and correlating machine-generated log data in real-time
Governance - Assess your cloud readiness and enforce cloud governance guidelines

What are the business outcomes you can expect from AIOps Experience?

Before you start to implement the Service Operations Workspace for ITOM, it is critical to have a clear vision of what you want to accomplish. ITOM Health allows you to deliver many positive business outcomes, and you can achieve all this over time. However, by deciding which outcomes are most important for your organization and agreeing on them with your stakeholders, you can set clear expectations and tailor your initial implementation to realize these goals.

Service Operations Workspace for ITOM benefits:

Eliminate incidents - Shift your service operations team from creating incidents to addressing actionable alerts.
Minimize service disruptions - Maximize uptime with problem identification, collaboration, and resolution in a single workspace.
Support greater business productivity - Improve task focus and the overall employee experience with personalized, configurable views.
Reduce mean to repair - Quickly identify problems based on anomaly detection and root cause analysis, driven by data.

Before Getting Started

Customer Type	New and upgraded customers have free access to the AIOps Experience if they are ITOM Health customers. Upgrade customers are required to install the AIOps Experience app. The app has a dependency on Service Operations Workspace for ITOM Apps. This will get installed automatically if not installed previously.
Workspace Status	Identify whether you have teams working in the Agent/Operator workspace or not. Agent/Operator workspaces can be continued to be used in Utah but will not take advantage of the AIOps Experience i.e., classic workspaces will open in their own browser tab, nor can they be configured with the new full-featured UI Builder. We encourage customers who are not using workspaces to begin exploring our configurable workspace solutions after upgrading to San Diego+.
Release Strategy	Consider how you will deploy AIOps Experience to your production instance. It is highly recommended to activate the AIOps Experience in your sub-production environment and perform upgrade/regression testing to ensure your instance is operating as expected. Remediate any prior user interface customizations and activate the AIOps Experience with any remediations as part of your organization's normal release process to make the configuration changes in your production instance.

Steps to Quick Success

Step 0: Service Operations Workspace for ITOM

Learn about Service Operations Workspace for ITOM, and the AIOps Experience via our product documentation.

Step 1: Install AIOps Experience app

The AIOps Experience and the Service Operations Workspace for ITOM are available via the ServiceNow Store. Install the app on your sub-prod instance for testing and validation.

Step 2: Configure AIOps Experience and Service Operations Workspace for ITOM

Prior to or shortly after activating the apps, explore the kind of configurations that are available. If desired, configure dashboards, actions available in the express list, and custom columns in the Alert preview panel.

Step 3a: Learn about the Workspace UI

A workspace is a suite of tools that provides personas such as agents, case managers, service desk professionals, managers, and other process users with the tools to assist customers quickly and perform process-based tasks.

Step 3b: Learn about UI Builder

Create and customize workspace pages with UI Builder or create custom web experienced using Next Experience Components and custom web components.

Step 4: Explore further with training

Now that you've implemented Service Operations Workspace and the AIOps experience, you are ready to take the next step into configuring and customizing workspaces and landing pages with UI Builder.

Other Helpful Resources

We also have an Event Management fundamentals course, as well as a Health Log Analytics fundamentals course. If you are new to ServiceNow, we also strongly recommend that you take this very short Get Started with the Now Platform course to learn platform basics. If you want a deeper dive into using the Now Platform, a longer ServiceNow Fundamentals course is also available. Finally, to get you started with SOW, please visit our Getting Started Guide for Service Operations Workspace.