In any technology fueled business, systems outages and website glitches are serious business. IT service outages can disrupt revenue transactions and social media interactions, halt manufacturing lines, and interrupt life-critical systems. The pain is obvious: customer frustration, revenue loss, regulatory non-compliance, and a tarnished brand.
As technology is woven into customer experiences and core business processes, IT leaders are facing growing challenges in keeping systems up and running. Applications and services are increasingly becoming complex and distributed, and depend on the flawless operation of software, servers, storage and networks in private data centers and multiple clouds. New software functionalities are being rapidly developed and deployed, adding a fresh stream of code to production environments.
IT teams are laser focused on keeping applications and services running as expected, and this often requires heroic measures. To resolve IT service issues faster and more efficiently, many organizations are enhancing their IT service management (ITSM) platforms with application intelligence. IT operations teams already rely on ITSM platforms like ServiceNow to ensure the efficient delivery of high-quality IT services. By integrating data from application performance management (APM) solutions like AppDynamics, organizations can eliminate service outages and get more value out of their IT investments.
End-to-end App Intelligence
To meet customer and employee expectations for always-on applications and services, IT operations teams need to see the bigger picture. The complete picture. Not the fractured view from dozens of management consoles that they have today, left to sift through massive data volumes to draw their own conclusions.
Combining the service management capabilities of ServiceNow with real-time application performance and availability insights of AppDynamics delivers that comprehensive view. With an ITSM platform that’s application aware, IT teams have end-to-end visibility across a complex web of applications and infrastructure.
With the AppDynamics for the ServiceNow app, AppDynamics data can be integrated into the ServiceNow configuration management database (CMDB). This integration provides IT teams with a complete view of application or business service performance — including the underlying logical and physical dependencies. The enhanced visibility and control enables IT to improve application availability, optimize performance, and resolve service issues faster — even avoid service outages in the first place. Ultimately, that intelligence drives greater customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
With AppDynamics, IT can clearly see each step of a customer’s journey across the IT infrastructure; whether that’s purchasing a ticket, transferring funds, tracking an order, streaming a video, or some other business service. AppDynamics traces every transaction in real time and automatically creates visual flow maps of business transactions. These flow maps are the aggregate of all software functions and components needed to deliver an application response to a device or user-initiated request. IT has detailed visibility into the end-to-end business transaction performance; not just the health of the application and infrastructure at a macro level.
When AppDynamics data is fed into ServiceNow, IT teams gain broader visibility into both the applications and the underlying infrastructure. Events that impact users appear in ServiceNow dashboards, so IT operations teams maintain situational awareness of all critical business services. The broader IT and business teams have a single record system to manage application and infrastructure service delivery, and ensure critical business systems receive the resources they need.
Triage faster to reduce outages
Integrating application performance data into ServiceNow allows IT teams to identify and resolve issues faster — and maintain service availability more easily. Real-time awareness of the performance of critical business services, with the ability to log, categorize, prioritize, and respond to events and incidents has never been so critical.
ServiceNow correlates events from multiple monitoring tools, including AppDynamics, and places those events within the context of an application or business transaction. That correlation significantly cuts down on the white noise of events.
Application performance data can be linked to incident, problem, and change processes in ServiceNow. Incidents are correlated with the appropriate configuration items within the ServiceNow CMBD, making it easier to identify troublesome systems and components.
Getting to the right information faster helps speed root cause analysis and resolve the performance issue faster. Functional IT teams can collaborate more effectively when everyone is working from a single source of truth. The duration of service outages is shortened, and the fingerpointing and tensions that are often associated with a critical outage are eased. Developers, system and network administrators, and support staff can get back to their strategic work faster — or get back to sleep.
Automate repairs and maximize uptime
Enhancing ServiceNow with application intelligence gives IT teams richer insights into application and service performance. Insights into pending issues, like performance degradation of a critical business transaction, can be used to proactively repair issues to ensure the health of an application or service.
ServiceNow tickets can be created automatically in response to alerts, so the operation team is immediately made aware and can get started working on an incident right away. In addition, ServiceNow can trigger automated remediation actions that will trigger incident management processes to reduce the time to recovery. For instance, AppDynamics can identify a line of code that has changed and is impacting application performance, with ServiceNow automating remediation.
Automated repairs mitigate the risk of outages to revenue-generating services. But automation also empowers the frontline operations staff to handle more issues directly, without having to escalate to more skilled teams. With a runbook that includes automated remediation, operations staff are more productive and can advance their own knowledge and skills more quickly.
Accelerate digital success
Digital transformation is challenging, and organizations need simple and effective techniques to ensure a successful evolution. When an application or service begins to degrade, IT teams need to be empowered with the insights and tools to resolve the problem quickly, whether that problem is at the application, infrastructure, or cloud layer level. With AppDynamics for ServiceNow, IT teams gain that visibility and control, enabling higher quality digital services.
