Case Study
“ServiceWatch enables IT to manage
services instead of servers and improve
the level of services we offer.”
Implementing a “Service-Aware” Approach to
IT Management using ServiceWatch
Geographies
Global
Highlights
Deploys ServiceWatch for
“Service-Aware” Approach to IT
Management
Business
Global company with an extensive
product portfolio spanning the BSS/OSS
domains with a wide range of proven
services and deep industry expertise
Company Size
22,000+ employees
Challenges
• Laborious, costly, and error-prone
manual service modeling effort
• Lack of cross-domain integrated monitoring results in no clear picture of “full
availability”
• CAB inability to assess impact of
change negatively impacts service
availability
• IT SLAs not met due to extended
recovery time
Solution
• ServiceNow ServiceWatch
Results
• Rapid service modeling – a few hours
per service
• Automatic, near real-time updates of
service models
www.servicenow.com
A global company, with a presence in over 80 countries and 22,000+ employees, ensures
service provider success by combining an extensive product portfolio spanning the BSS/
OSS domains with a wide range of proven services and deep industry expertise.
The Director of IT Service Management has responsibility for the Global Service Desk,
Network Operations Centers and supporting IT processes. Her vision is to improve
the quality and performance of services that IT offers to internal business stakeholders
by focusing on reducing system-wide failures, increasing mean time between failures
(MTBF), and improving the recovery time from service failures. Her objectives include
surpassing IT SLAs with internal business partners.
The Challenge
To improve the level of the services provided to their business partners, IT is embarking
on a paradigm shift from managing servers to managing services. A current tools vendor
provides adequate monitoring for network, servers and applications, but the technology
domains are monitored separately resulting in no clear picture of “full availability” for any
business service. With over 100 business services running in a complex data center
environment, any incident originating in a server, network device, or storage array triggers
alerts regardless of the real impact on the business service. The result is elongated rootcause analyses, inability to understand the impact of a proposed change, and restricted
visibility evidenced in not knowing anything beyond if a particular service was unavailable.
The IT team understood that the core challenge was the inability to view the health
and availability of business services. The team found that mapping business services
was difficult, requiring 2 to 3 weeks per service. With over 100 services, the cost
to perform the initial mapping would be prohibitive. In addition, on-going costs to
manually maintain accuracy of over 100 service models in a fast-changing environment
would also be unacceptable.
According to the Director of IT Service Management, “We immediately recognized the
value that accurate and always up-to-date service models would deliver and how they
would address many of the systemic challenges related to Service Availability but, in spite
of devoting much effort to manually create maps, it was such a pointless effort that we
terminated it. Two to three weeks to map one service model is unacceptable, considering
that it was outdated before the exercise was even finished.”
Implementing a “Service-Aware” Approach to IT Management
Benefits Realized
The company implemented and mapped
all 100 critical business services using
ServiceNow ServiceWatch. Benefits
realized to date include the following:
Service Modeling Speed
• Savings of $950,000 due to the speed
and ease of creating service models.
Using ServiceWatch, the IT team was
able to model each business service
within a few hours. Once the entry point
to the business service was provided, the
automated discovery process detected
all IT components from the application
down to the switch level. Prior to
deploying ServiceWatch, creating service
models took 2 to 3 weeks for each
business service.
Time to Value
• ServiceWatch is a pivotal component
enabling IT’s objective of shifting
from managing servers to managing
services. As all 100 key business
services were modeled 20 times more
efficiently than planned using legacy
tools, the overall project was able to
exceed a key milestone date.
Modern, Agile Implementation
• “ServiceWatch is a flexible, agile
tool – not like many of the heavy,
legacy tools which IT has struggled
with implementing,” according to the
Director of IT Service Management.
The application was easy to deploy and
permitted an accelerated time to value
– in hours, not months.
Trusted-Advisor Engagement Approach
• “The ServiceNow engagement was a
true ‘trusted-advisor’ partnership from
beginning to end,” according to the
Director of IT Service Management.
“ServiceNow showed us how to correctly
map CIs resulting in fewer mistakes.”
About ServiceNow ServiceWatch
ServiceNow ServiceWatch has an
innovative top-down approach to
discovering and mapping the relationships
between data center components that
comprise specific business services,
providing insights into how those services
are delivered and how they are performing.
ServiceWatch automatically discovers and
maps all applications and IT infrastructure
components upon which the business
service depends. The resulting accurate
topological map provides real-time visibility
of which IT components are delivering
which business service, even in dynamic,
virtualized environments. Dashboards track
the health of business services in real time,
correlate service issues with infrastructure
events, and configure metrics to alert based
on business impact. Monitored events are
aggregated via integration with third-party
monitoring systems, and correlated to
business services.
Case Study
“Business services
are mapped
automatically within
hours without any
manual configuration,
and are integrated
into our home-grown
dashboard.”
Manager,
Enterprise Infrastructure,
Tools and Automation
About ServiceNow
ServiceNow is the enterprise IT cloud
company. We transform IT by automating
and managing IT across the global
enterprise. Organizations deploy our service
to create a single system of record for IT
and automate manual tasks, standardize
processes, and consolidate legacy
systems. Using our extensible platform,
our customers create custom applications
and evolve the IT service model to service
domains inside and outside the enterprise.
To learn about ServiceNow, please visit
www.servicenow.com.
www.servicenow.com
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