ITOM Visibility
Summarize
Summary of ITOM Visibility
ServiceNow® ITOM Visibility is a comprehensive product suite designed to provide enterprises and cloud service providers with a unified, connected view of their entire IT network and supporting services. It includes key components such as Discovery, Service Mapping, Certificate Inventory and Management, Service Graph Connectors, CMDB 360, and Firewall Audits and Reporting. These tools collectively enable organizations to maintain an accurate and complete Configuration Management Database (CMDB), which is critical for managing IT services effectively.
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Key Features
- Discovery: Automatically identifies IT infrastructure components such as servers, software, printers, routers, switches, cloud resources, and TLS certificates through horizontal discovery. It uses probes and sensors along with discovery patterns to collect and update CMDB data.
- Service Mapping: Provides top-down mapping of dependencies between devices and applications, creating application service maps that visualize infrastructure objects, their connections, and any faults. Maps are regularly updated to reflect current state and impact of issues.
- Certificate Inventory and Management, Service Graph Connectors, CMDB 360, Firewall Audits and Reporting: Complement Discovery and Service Mapping by enhancing visibility, security, and CMDB accuracy.
- Integration with ServiceNow AI Platform products: Enables ITOM Health for service health tracking and anomaly detection, ITOM Optimization for cloud infrastructure provisioning and cost management, Software Asset Management for license tracking, Customer Service Management for infrastructure issue diagnosis, IT Service Management for service delivery, Strategic Portfolio Management for application insights, and Security Operations for risk prioritization.
How It Works
Discovery uses scripts (probes and sensors) and patterns to identify and collect data on configuration items (CIs). Service Mapping builds on this foundation by mapping relationships between CIs, producing application service maps that highlight the impact of faults on service operations. Multiple methods, such as discovery patterns, tags, and traffic connections, can be used to create these maps.
Licensing and Requirements
ITOM Visibility requires activation of Discovery and Service Mapping plugins and a valid ITOM Visibility subscription. Licensing terms depend on the customer contract and are managed through the ServiceNow AI Platform. Customers should install the latest ITOM Visibility applications from the ServiceNow Store for full functionality and keep updated with release notes.
Getting Started
- Activate the Discovery and Service Mapping plugins.
- Install out-of-band ITOM Visibility apps from the ServiceNow Store.
- Define user roles and configure credentials for network access.
- Follow prerequisites for top-down discovery to enable Service Mapping.
This enables ServiceNow customers to build and maintain an accurate CMDB, visualize service dependencies, proactively monitor IT health, optimize cloud costs, manage software assets, and improve IT and security operations through integrated, near real-time infrastructure data.
The ServiceNow® ITOM Visibility product consists of ServiceNow® Discovery, ServiceNow® Service Mapping, Certificate Inventory and Management, Service Graph Connectors, CMDB 360, and Firewall Audits and Reporting. Discovery and Service Mapping give you a unified, connected view of your entire IT network and the services that it supports.
Who uses ITOM Visibility
ITOM Visibility enables the IT departments of enterprises and cloud companies providing platform as a service to discover their IT resources.
ServiceNow® Configuration Management Database (CMDB) is not just an operational tool, it is a strategic necessity in today’s IT landscape. Maintaining an accurate and complete CMDB provides the foundation for maintaining critical services and drives multiple outcomes important to IT departments.
- ITOM Health
- Use ITOM Health to track and maintain the health of services in your organization. ITOM Health gathers alerts from infrastructure events captured by third-party monitoring tools. It then uses IT-related information gathered by Discovery to map alerts to configuration items. Based on the collected information, ITOM Health provides dashboards showing a consolidated view of all service-impact events. You can also use ITOM Health to proactively analyze your IT infrastructure to spot issues and prevent service outages. Using advanced machine learning to analyze information about your IT infrastructure, the application automatically determines dynamic thresholds and identifies anomalies that may indicate potential service outages.
- ITOM Optimization
- ITOM Optimization gives you tools to provision private and public cloud infrastructure and services and to achieve consistent management and cost visibility. The Cloud Insights application, available in the ServiceNow Store, helps you to analyze the full range of costs associated with cloud assets so you can identify and take action on opportunities to save money and optimize operations.
- Software Asset Management
- Understand the software running in your IT environment. Software Asset Management works together with the CMDB powered up by ITOM Visibility. Use Software Asset Management to track configurations that impact software license consumption across your IT environments and datacenter.
- Customer Service Management
- Efficiently diagnose and resolve issues related to the IT infrastructure by using near real-time data supplied by ITOM Visibility.
- IT Service Management
- Rely on the IT infrastructure discovered by ITOM Visibility to manage and deliver services to your users. See changes and incidents created and managed by IT Service Management applications in ITOM Visibility service maps.
- Strategic Portfolio Management
- Use data collected by ITOM Visibility to gain a comprehensive understanding of the applications used in your organization.
- Security Operations
- View security incidents in the context of ITOM Visibility to find out which application services are at risk. Use this information to prioritize and resolve threats based on the impact they pose to your organization.
How you use ITOM Visibility
The Discovery feature offers a replicable and reliable method of identifying the enterprise IT infrastructure. Discovery can find computers, servers, software, printers, routers, and switches. It can also find IP-enabled devices and applications that run on them, resources from various cloud providers, and TLS certificates. This method is referred to as horizontal discovery. Connections between the devices and applications are not included in horizontal discovery.
The Service Mapping feature maps dependencies, based on a connection between devices and applications. This method is referred to as top-down mapping. The top-down mapping helps you immediately see the impact of a problematic object on the rest of the application service operation. Application service maps show infrastructure objects and connections between them. Service Mapping regenerates application service maps regularly, to keep them updated and relevant. Any faulty objects are shown along with the devices and applications they affect, providing a visual clue of the state of the application service.
How ITOM Visibility works
Discovery can use scripts to collect and process data on a host and then update the CMDB. Scripts that explore or investigate CIs on your network are called probes. Sensors are the scripts that parse the data returned from the probes. In addition, Discovery uses discovery patterns. A pattern is a sequence of operations whose purpose is to detect attributes of devices and applications and, when used by Service Mapping, their outbound connections.
Service Mapping can deploy different methods for creating application services. Discovery patterns are the main method used by Service Mapping. However, you can also map application services using tags, and traffic connections between devices and applications. For more information, see Choose the right method for mapping application services.
ITOM Visibility licensing
The ServiceNow AI Platform® uses a licensing method where your organization is billed for using ITOM Visibility applications. Licensing options can vary based on your organization’s agreement. The ServiceNow Product Documentation doesn't provide information on prices, packaging, or other details determined by your organization customer contract. For general information about licensing and subscriptions, see ITOM/OT SU Licensing and subscriptions.
What to know before you begin
ITOM Visibility is available with activation of the Discovery (com.snc.discovery) plugin and the Service Mapping (com.snc.service-mapping) plugin, which require an ITOM Visibility subscription. For details, see Request Discovery and Request Service Mapping. For full ITOM Visibility functionality, install the latest ITOM Visibility out-of-band applications from the ServiceNow Store. For cumulative release note information for all released apps, see the ServiceNow Store version history release notes.
Define users and configure credentials to enable ITOM Visibility access to applications and devices inside your organization network. For details, see Prerequisites for performing top-down discovery using Service Mapping.