ServiceNow Otto for IT Operations Management (ITOM) release notes
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Summary of ServiceNow Otto for IT Operations Management (ITOM) Release Notes – Zurich Release
ServiceNow Otto for IT Operations Management (ITOM) introduces generative AI capabilities that enhance ITOM workflows by providing deeper alert analysis, autonomous alert management, and improved service reliability tracking. The Zurich release and its subsequent patches deliver continuous enhancements to AI-driven workflows, integrations with cloud and observability platforms, and user experience improvements.
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Key Features
- Agentic Workflows and AI Agents: Multiple AI-powered agentic workflows such as analyze alert impact, manage alerts autonomously, triage and analyze alerts, and analyze potential impact deliver automated triage, impact analysis, root cause investigation, and change impact assessment.
- Integration with Observability Tools: Support for multiple observability platforms including Dynatrace (via MCP server agent), New Relic, Kentik, Datadog, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, and Google Gemini enables comprehensive alert investigation and response.
- Service Level Objectives (SLOs) Automation: The SLO creator agent auto-generates service level objectives for Service Reliability Management (SRM) services by analyzing incidents, alerts, and outages, facilitating faster adoption and monitoring of reliability.
- Enhanced Now Assist Capabilities: Now Assist is rebranded as ServiceNow Otto, integrating conversational AI for multimodal interactions and autonomous orchestration within ITOM workflows.
- Security and Access Controls: AI agents and workflows enforce security via Access Control Lists (ACLs) configured in AI Agent Studio, ensuring controlled usage based on user roles.
- UI and Experience Improvements: Introduction of the Coral theme with a dark mode option improves user interface consistency and accessibility across portals, web, and mobile applications.
- Error Analysis and Certificate Management: Now Assist AI agents can analyze errors in Agent Client Collector and automate TLS certificate renewal processes.
Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers
- Improved Alert Management Efficiency: Automation reduces manual effort in triaging, analyzing, and resolving alerts, shortening resolution times and increasing operational efficiency.
- Broader Observability Coverage: Integration with leading cloud and monitoring platforms provides richer context for alerts, enabling more informed and faster incident responses.
- Faster SLO Adoption: Automatically generated SLOs help teams monitor and improve service reliability without manual setup.
- Secure AI Utilization: Role-based access and ACLs ensure that AI agents and workflows operate within defined security boundaries.
- Enhanced User Experience: New themes and conversational interfaces improve usability, aiding IT teams in navigating and leveraging AI capabilities effectively.
- Flexible Activation and Configuration: Default activation of generative AI skills and workflows streamlines setup for new customers, while existing customers retain control over enabling features.
Activation and Licensing
ServiceNow Otto for ITOM is available on the ServiceNow Store and requires an ITOM Pro Plus or Enterprise Plus license. Customers should verify entitlements to access specific features. Installation includes the AIOps Experience and Otto for ITOM applications.
Important Updates and Deprecations
- Google Gemini Cloud Assist agent and Dynatrace analysis AI agent are being deprecated; customers should migrate to updated agents such as the Gemini Cloud Assist A2A Investigation Agent and Dynatrace MCP server agent.
- Several AI agents were moved from analyze alert impact workflows to manage alerts autonomously workflows to consolidate functionality.
- AI usage measurement has transitioned to a burn-down model aligned with contract anniversaries for improved tracking.
Related Applications and Tools
- Now Assist: Enhances self-service and organizational efficiency with generative AI skills for incident and resolution management.
- AI Admin Hub Console: Central interface for setting up, configuring, and monitoring Now Assist and AI features.
- Service Operations Workspace (SOW): Integration of AI-powered playbooks and service health analysis for streamlined IT operations management.
The ServiceNow® ServiceNow Otto for ITOM application brings generative AI to ITOM. ServiceNow Otto for ITOM was enhanced and updated in the Zurich release.
ServiceNow Otto for ITOM highlights for the Zurich release
Zurich Patch 12
- ServiceNow Otto is the new AI experience brand. This change is reflected in the name of ServiceNow products, including ServiceNow Otto for ITOM. Your product entitlements remain unchanged. Check your entitlements to determine your access to specific features.
- Use the Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud AI agents for deeper analysis in the analyze alert impact agentic workflow.
Use the ITOM MCP Server with an MCP client application to investigate alerts, review configuration item (CI) reliability, assess incident impact, and create service level objectives (SLOs).
Zurich Patch 8
- AIOps LEAP added support for new third-party model Claude Sonnet 4.6.
- Auto-generate service level objectives (SLOs) to help teams track service reliability in SRM.
Zurich Patch 7
- Use the Dynatrace Model Context Protocol (MCP) server agent for deeper analysis in the analyze alert impact and manage alerts autonomously agentic workflows.
- Analyze a Service Observability dashboard to find performance insights.
- Understand service health by analyzing all available Service Observability dashboards for a service.
- Expand support for 3P AI Model in AIOps LEAP to include additional model options across Small (OpenAI GPT-4o mini, Claude Haiku 4.5, Gemini 2.0 Flash) and Large (OpenAI GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 2.0 Pro) tracks.
- Review changes to Now Assist usage measurement.
- Now Assist skills used in the analyze potential impact agentic workflow are turned on by default.
- Use the new manage alerts autonomously workflow to efficiently manage alerts and minimize resolution times, including an AI agent for triage, impact analysis, and root cause investigation.
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- Create Knowledge Base articles with embedded command snippets
- View an error analysis by Now Assist in Agent Client Collector.
- Additional role configuration required for agentic workflows and AI agents included with your applications.
- Get deeper impact analysis in the analyze alert impact agentic workflow with five new AI agents.
- Enhance security for Now Assist AI agents with access control lists (ACLs).
- Find all TLS certificates expiring within a determined time and renew them in a single prompt.
- Use the triage and analyze alert agentic workflow to perform initial triage and analysis in the context of an incident.
- Review Alert analysis, and relevant information for new mixed alert groups in the Now Assist panel to help investigate alerts more effectively.
See Now Assist for IT Operations Management (ITOM) for more information.
Important:
ServiceNow Otto for ITOM is available in the ServiceNow Store. For details, see the "Activation information" section of these release notes.
New in the Zurich release
- Zurich Patch 12
- Configure the Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud agents
- Set up the Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud AI agents to get insights from those tools in the analyze alert impact agentic workflow. With Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud support, the workflow helps you investigate and respond to alerts from a wider range of observability tools, including Dynatrace, New Relic, and Kentik.
- Zurich Patch 9
- Use the ITOM MCP Server to connect an MCP client application, such as Claude or Moveworks, to your ServiceNow ITOM environment. Investigate alerts, review CI reliability, assess incident impact on reliability, and create standard availability SLOs through the MCP client application.
- Zurich Patch 8
- Auto-generate SLOs for SRM services
- Use the SLO creator agent to generate SLOs for your SRM services. The agent analyzes incidents, alerts, and outage events to automatically create SLOs, helping teams adopt SLOs faster and track service reliability.
- Zurich Patch 7
- Set up the new Dynatrace MCP server agent, which replaces the Dynatrace analysis AI agent, for deeper alert analysis. In the analyze alert impact agentic workflow, you can ask more detailed questions about Dynatrace alerts, such as questions about logs, topology, or recent changes. In the manage alerts autonomously agentic workflow, investigations now pull more comprehensive Dynatrace context based on alert type.
- Updates to the manage alerts autonomously agentic workflow
- The manage alerts autonomously agentic workflow has been updated to provide additional AI insights in the preview panel and alert record. These updates include:
- Summaries of the logic behind automated decisions, such as auto closures of insignificant alerts
- A written summary of the Service Observability dashboard
- Analyze log analytics alerts to assess impact and triage urgency
- The manage alert autonomously agentic workflow now includes AI-driven analysis for log analytics alerts. The alert hypothesizer skill evaluates historical patterns to assess if triage is required. It also classifies alerts as proactive or reactive, where proactive indicates emerging risk and reactive indicates an active issue. The analysis can include contextual insights such as potential failure scenarios to support an alert investigation.
- Analyze Service Observability dashboard skill
- The analyze Service Observability dashboard skill uses generative AI to summarize a single Service Observability dashboard and calls out insights found in charts. This summary helps operators quickly orient to and understand a particular dashboard. Once activated, this skill is available on all Service Observability dashboards and runs automatically from Incident Investigation when Service Observability is installed.
- Analyze service health
- The analyze service health skill uses generative AI to analyze all available Service Observability dashboards for the selected service in the Service Operations Workspace (SOW). It generates a summary of a service’s health and calls out any found insights. Once activated, this skill is available from the header of a service record in the SOW.
- Zurich Patch 5
- Enhance IT operations with AI-driven, autonomous alert management using the manage alerts autonomously workflow
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Automate alert triage, impact analysis, and root cause investigation with an AI-driven workflow that replaces manual operator steps with autonomous decision-making. The workflow processes incoming alerts end-to-end and surfaces consolidated insights through Express List, giving operators immediate visibility into what happened, what's affected, and why.
- Configure the Datadog and Gemini Cloud Assistant observability skills
- Set up the new Datadog and Gemini Cloud Assistant observability skills to get insights from those tools in the manage alerts autonomously agentic workflow. With Datadog and Google Gemini, the workflow now supports five observability tools, including Dynatrace, Kentik, and New Relic, helping you investigate and respond to a wider range of alerts.
- AIOps LEAP skill setup
- Status information for records grouping job run is available when skills are modified with support KB content.
- AIOps LEAP settings page
- The new interface for the AIOps LEAP properties includes default configuration to achieve opportunity savings and reporting.
- Action Insights panel
- The Action Insights panel on the automation opportunity details page provides suggestion to create sub-groups when there are large volumes of records. This helps optimize opportunities and knowledge gaps for architects.
- Zurich Patch 4
- View an error analysis by Now Assist in Agent Client Collector
- Starting in version 6.0.0, use Now Assist AI agents to gather information about errors occurring on Agent Client Collector agents. For example, you can verify the underlying cause behind a specific error or error code.
- Zurich Patch 1
- Configure the Dynatrace analysis AI agent
- Set up the Dynatrace analysis AI agent in the analyze alert impact agentic workflow to investigate Dynatrace alerts. With Dynatrace, the agentic workflow now supports three observability tools, including Kentik and New Relic, helping you investigate and respond to a wider range of alerts.
- Expand the analyze alert impact agentic workflow with four new AIOps agents
- Get a fuller view of alert impact with four new AIOps agents in the analyze alert impact agentic workflow. Along with observability data, the agentic workflow now includes information from within ServiceNow to help surface business impact and related issues. Activate the AIOps agents to include them in the agentic workflow.
- Enhance your decision-making process with the analyze potential impact agentic workflow
- Assess the potential impact of a change using the analyze potential impact agentic workflow. This workflow provides an analysis of the relevant servers and suggested services that might be impacted by your change request, ensuring that you have all the insights needed to make informed decisions before making a change.
- Add access control lists for security in AI agents
- Enable security settings to run AI agents and agentic workflows using ACLs and user identities. You can configure and manage the ACLs in AI Agent Studio.
- Now Assist certificate renewal AI agent
- Use the Now Assist certificate renewal AI agentic workflow to automatically renew certificates before they expire. You can perform the following with the Now Assist certificate renewal AI agent:
- Renew individual certificates
- Find all certificates about to expire
- Renew all certificates about to expire in a single prompt
- Utilize the triage and analyze alerts agentic workflow in the context of an incident
- Initiate the triage and analyze alerts agentic workflow from the Now Assist panel in the context of the incident form to perform all the functions of the workflow. This workflow automatically assigns, acknowledges, and summarizes origin alerts, determines their significance through historical analysis, and analyzes related incidents.
UI changes
- Coral theme
- Coral is now the default theme for new portal, web, and mobile experiences with Next Experience or Core UI enabled. This theme provides a fresh look and feel, featuring brand-neutral illustrations to enhance your user experience. A dark theme option is available for web and mobile experiences.
Changed in this release
- Zurich Patch 12
- Now Assist > ServiceNow Otto® announcement
- Now Assist introduced AI on the platform. As that experience has evolved, there's a new name for the experience. ServiceNow Otto® is the conversational AI platform integrated into ServiceNow workflows. It provides agentic capabilities, supports multimodal interactions across web, mobile, and messaging channels, and enables autonomous orchestration for cross-system workflows.
- Zurich Patch 5
- Changes to Now Assist usage measurement
- Starting with Australia Early Access, AI usage measurement is transitioning from a 365-day look-back model to a 365-day burn-down model, with usage resetting at the contract anniversary date. For more information, refer to KB KB2704710: AI Usage - Overview & New Measurement Logic.
- AIOps AI agents removed from the analyze alert impact agentic workflow
- Four AIOps AI agents have been removed from the analyze alert impact agentic workflow because they're now available in the manage alerts autonomously agentic workflow. AI agents for Dynatrace, Kentik, and New Relic remain in the analyze alert impact agentic workflow to help you learn about and respond to alerts.
- Some generative AI skills, AI agents, and agentic workflows are turned on by default
- The skills are automatically available to appropriate role users for the application, such as ITIL roles on incident forms or change forms. This change simply activates the skill and does not touch the roles that may be
needed to use the skill. The new default behavior works as follows:
- New customers: When you install an AI product, designated skills and agentic workflows are turned on automatically.
- Existing customers who are upgrading (starting with Australia Early Access): Any previously unconfigured skill, agent, or agentic workflow is turned on automatically (the AI asset was never configured and turned on, then turned off again). Previously configured skills and agentic workflows that were turned on, then off, remain inactive.
- AIOps LEAP rebranding
- AIOps LEAP is renamed as Learning-Enhanced Automation Platform reflecting expanded scope beyond just Playbook creation.
- Service Operations Workspace (SOW) Integration
- Playbooks appear in SOW module.
- Data Range Display
- The AIOps LEAP landing page shows analyzed data date range for automation teams to be aware of time-ranges of analysis.
- Zurich Patch 4
- Role configuration required for agentic workflows and AI agents
- Agentic workflows and AI agents included with your applications require additional security configuration. If you select Users with selected roles for your user access security controls for an agentic workflow or AI agent, you must add the installed roles, or they will not execute. See the documentation for the agentic workflow or AI agent for the specific roles you must add.
Deprecations
In Zurich Patch 12, the Google Gemini Cloud Assist agent is being prepared for future deprecation. To continue receiving Google Cloud insights, use the analyze alert impact agentic workflow which includes the Gemini Cloud Assist A2A Investigation Agent. For configuration instructions, see .
In Zurich Patch 7, the Dynatrace analysis AI agent is being prepared for future deprecation. To continue getting Dynatrace insights in agentic workflows, deactivate the Dynatrace analysis AI agent and set up the Dynatrace MCP server agent. For configuration details, see .
Activation information
Install AIOps Experience [sn_sow_aiops] and ServiceNow Otto for ITOM from the ServiceNow Store. Visit the ServiceNow Store website to view all the available apps and for information about submitting requests to the store. For cumulative release notes information for all released apps, see the ServiceNow Store version history release notes.
Additional requirements
The ServiceNow Otto for ITOM application requires an ITOM Pro Plus or Enterprise Plus license.
Accessibility information
- Dark theme
- The new Coral theme includes a dark theme option for web and mobile experiences. This option is commonly used to alleviate eye strain and improve readability.