Foreword
With 7+ years of experience in IT Service and Operations Management (ITSM and ITOM), Softazy has developed a dedicated ServiceNow competence center to share the expertise with our clients. Softazy certified professionals have the required qualification to implement core ServiceNow solutions of any complexity, including CMDB and Service Mapping. We help businesses establish straightforward and efficient ITSM and ITOM processes powered by ServiceNow.
The following document covers numerous aspects of Softazy service offering around Service Mapping, structured for your convenience. The subsequent sections provide an overview of the Service Mapping solution, service options, and pricing from Softazy.
In case you have any inquiries or suggestions regarding this document or Softazy services, please contact us directly. We will be glad to help you and learn about your challenges and business case.
1. Service Mapping Introduction
The last decade was marked with a rapid cross-industry shift to enterprise modernization and digitization. Since 2014, the average number of deployed applications has reached 129 apps per company, having increased by 68%.
With every round of technological upgrades, companies embrace new services, solutions, and technologies that pile up into a complex system of interdependent applications. What was initially designed to make business processes and operations faster, simpler, and more effective, eventually became an obstacle for seamless functionality.
To turn a multitude of applications in your favor, you can utilize Configuration Management Database (CMDB) and Service Mapping from ServiceNow — a solution offering the visibility your team needs for a complete, accurate, and up-to-date map of your IT infrastructure with all its components and relations.
Providing a comprehensive set of service mapping options, the Service Mapping solution is tightly integrated with your ServiceNow CMDB, which allows you to create a single system of record and enables other ServiceNow solutions with valuable data.
How It Works?
The variety of IT solutions deployed in any company ranges from hardware, such as computers, servers, network equipment, to multiple types of software, including cloud solutions, enterprise applications, web services, etc. To keep track of all the objects within the company’s IT infrastructure, IT departments typically create an inventory that lists devices, services, and applications as standalone articles. While applicable, this method, known as horizontal discovery, does not address the challenge of a nonhomogeneous system since it does not represent the relations and dependencies between the objects.
Service Mapping discovers all application services in your organization and builds a comprehensive map of all devices, applications, and configuration profiles used in these application services. To complete the end-to-end visibility of your IT infrastructure, Service Mapping also includes dependencies, based on a connection between devices and applications. The top-down mapping, utilized by ServiceNow, creates a holistic view of the IT infrastructure to help you see what impact a single object has on the application service. Thus, when detecting a problematic item, CMDB Service Mapping will show you all its dependencies, related devices, and applications that may be affected.
As every IT landscape differs, so do the mapping methods. Service Mapping relies on a variety of approaches to create the most precise maps that will benefit your organization. The primary method of Service Mapping for discovering and mapping devices and applications is based on patterns, which allows detecting operation sequences. In case you have a tag system, it can be incorporated into the topology of your services so that you keep using a familiar approach. One of the most advanced methods that allow for extremely accurate mapping is traffic-based. Powered by machine learning, it refines automatically generated maps even for the most complex IT infrastructures.
2. Why Service Mapping?
Having a number of applications deployed, enterprises can find it difficult to achieve the desired visibility of their IT infrastructure without proper documentation that depicts system components and dependencies. Creating and updating such documentation often relies on cumbersome and resource-consuming manual work.
While requiring significant time and effort, this approach results in simplistic, one-dimensional application mapping, usually in the form of a spreadsheet with a list of inventories. One can also use topology diagrams for their applications to add extra information and show the relationships between the infrastructure components. Yet, it usually does not display fully the complexity of connections within application services.
To achieve the level of detail that could streamline IT operations and enable a comprehensive view of an IT infrastructure, a company would require much more than an inventory spreadsheet. Moreover, creating, updating, and using a manually created artifact of such complexity could mitigate any benefits a company could get from it due to high chances of inaccurate data representation.
Many of these issues can be instantly solved by implementing Service Mapping. Retrieving data about the infrastructure from the company’s configuration management database, Service Mapping launches precise automated application service mapping with little to no effort from your side.
3. Key Challenges to Tackle with Service Mapping
1. Create a Comprehensive Applications Inventory
The starting point of the Service Mapping implementation is creating an application inventory. As at any moment you may have applications that fall into different stages of a development cycle, creating a complete application inventory will help you see your IT landscape in detail. Despite the current development state, all the applications will be included in the CMDB and Service Mapping by the time it is implemented.
On top of that, the mapping process will allow for a better understanding of the environments applications are running on, as well as process owners and their responsibilities.
2. Keep CMDB Up to Date
While many companies understand the importance of CMDB for their ServiceNow ecosystem, they find it challenging to keep it always updated due to the volumes of data. The Service Mapping solution is tightly integrated with CMDB and relies on the infrastructure data stored there. As a result, Service Mapping implementation will affect the database and by the end of the mapping process, CMDB update process will be implemented as well.
3. Improve Visibility of the IT Services
Lack of a comprehensive view of the IT services components results in a variety of scenarios when the required data is not accessible on demand. For instance, in case of a server failure, it is sometimes impossible to instantly recognize the severity and depth of the impact and promptly react to the incident. Data on IT infrastructure and applications usage can provide valuable insights on the cost of applications, their necessity, the required shifts, and changes that would improve the system.
Implementing Service Mapping enables companies with a visualization tool that in a simple yet effective manner presents relations and interconnections between businesses, services, and the infrastructure they use. This way, one can easily analyze any map, bulk dependency, or application usage.
4. Reduce Efforts Documenting Application Topology
As already mentioned, manual documentation of the application topology requires significant time and effort. The more comprehensive the mapping is, the more it is resource-consuming. Moreover, the application team often does not have all the information about the infrastructure and requires the involvement of other teams for the mapping process implementation, thus multiplying the effort.
At the same time, the longer it takes to create the map, the less relevant it becomes by the time it is built. With every little change in the system, the map must be updated to reflect the actual state. As long as it may involve several teams in the process, it is not always possible to do so within the shortest time.
Service Mapping allows overcoming those difficulties thanks to a built-in process around the map development and certification. Your team won’t have to put in effort after they complete the initial application mapping: automated updates will include all the later changes in the infrastructure.
5. Increase the Accuracy of Application Topology Documentation
In 7+ years of experience with ServiceNow, we encountered that more than half of application topology documentation does not depict the actual state of the IT landscape. Common errors include elements missing from the inventory; information contradicting other documents; problematic entry points; etc. The level of inaccuracy in the documents tends to increase with every implemented change, eliminating the value of the created mapping.
With ServiceNow Service Mapping, application maps are updated automatically to align with every infrastructure change. This way, you will never lose a new device, forget to map an application, or omit a certain document — all thanks to centralized data storage.
4. Solution Benefits
ServiceNow Service Mapping solution is designed to streamline your business operations with an end-to-end vision of your IT landscape. With CMDB as its foundation, Service Mapping will favor your company thanks to:
1. Holistic application documentation
While implementing the Service Mapping solution, your organization will undergo an in-depth review required to create the application inventory. As a result, you will get all of the company applications documented in terms of their topology and deployment, considering that the documents are always up to date and at hand.
2. Quicker time-to-value
Thanks to a straightforward mapping process with built-in features for maps development and certification, automated updates, advanced visualization, and bulk error handling, you will be able to benefit from Service Mapping in the shortest possible time.
3. Enhanced CMDB data quality
Ensure your CMDB is up-to-date and running while implementing the Service Mapping solution. Regular CMDB data reviews, discoverability analysis, and on-demand gap-filling during the discovery will secure your data and maintain current and accurate information.
4. Cost-efficient application management
With end-to-end visibility of all your apps and services, you will have all the information to further calculate the TCO of the company applications considering the costs of the infrastructure they actually use.
5. Data-driven infrastructure management
Get valuable insights on the requirements and improvements and eliminate possible risks. Enhance the incident and change management processes based on the understanding of how a single infrastructure element influences business applications it's used for.
5. Readiness Assessment
To evaluate properly the existing landscape and provide accurate pricing, as well as an implementation roadmap, Softazy offers to undergo Readiness Assessment first. It will allow for defining CMDB readiness for Service Mapping and compose the best roadmap for the Service Mapping implementation.
The Readiness Assessment stage is a set of four steps, which need to be performed prior to the Service Mapping implementation. After the completion of this stage, the customer will:
• Understand the actual state of IT landscape and CMDB readiness to Service Mapping.
• Receive recommendations on actions to take to reduce the cost of Service Mapping.
• Be aware of the Service Mapping scope and how its cost is to be calculated.
6. Why Softazy
Service Mapping and Change Management Implementation for One of Big Four Consulting Companies
Softazy analyzed and enhanced the existing ServiceNow infrastructure, which opened new possibilities for further scaling and upgrading of the system:
• Implemented a pattern-based Service Mapping solution for automated mapping;
• Calculated TCO of applications and new project implementation;
• Enabled automated updates of CMDB records;
• Enforced Change Management procedures to approve all CMDB changes.
Softazy is a full value chain vendor of ServiceNow services worldwide. We have 10+ years of expertise in core solutions implementation gained from successfully delivered projects with ITSM, ITOM, ITBM, HRSD, CMDB, Service Catalog, Automation and Orchestration, Self-Service Portal, and other solutions. Our expertise with ServiceNow is proven by numerous certificates issued to our consultants. To sustain uninterrupted development, we have established the ServiceNow Center of Excellence that provides better team scaling capabilities and brings an exceptional level of expertise.