ServiceNow Information Technology Operations Management (ITOM) teaches you about different applications and plugins that provide different capabilities to reduce disruption caused to the business. The key differentiator between other tools available in the market and ServiceNow ITOM is that the functions are available within ServiceNow to easily leverage the data natively. Each component of the ITOM suite has different capabilities that can be tied to each of the individual components and business services. We can predict outages well in advance and hence take proactive measures to avoid them.
The book's chapters cover the architecture and description of the each of ITOM's components, prerequisites for setting up the capabilites, installation instructions, and then finally explain the important settings and properties.
The book evolved from the Geneva release and has been updated to the Istanbul release. The author has taken all measures to provide improved service availability, immediate visibility of vital business services, and much more, all from the convenience of your single screen.By the end of this book, you should understand how ServiceNow ITOM functions within the ServiceNow ecosystem.
Chapter 1, Introduction to IT Operations Management in ServiceNow, introduces ServiceNow IT Operations Management, the importance of each of ITOM's components, and ITOM's high-level architecture.
Chapter 2, MID Server Essentials, walks through all the necessary steps to install MID Server and configure roles.
Chapter 3, Configuration Management Using ServiceNow Discovery, covers the different phases available, the ECC queue, and configuring discovery the easy way.
Chapter 4, Creating and Managing Dependency Views, focuses on learning the prerequisites, understanding the tables and properties, and learning about how to load and view dependency maps.
Chapter 5, Cloud Management, dives further into using cloud functionalities and capabilities, understanding the various out-of-the-box plugins available, understanding the different roles available, and exploring the cloud operational portal. Here, our focus will be on configuring Amazon Cloud Services, and we will touch on how other cloud providers can be configured.
Chapter 6, Automation Using ServiceNow Orchestration, discusses orchestration prerequisites and capabilities. Learn about orchestration workflows and run through a real example of using Active Directory objects.
Chapter 7, Exploring Service Mapping, discusses the service mapping architecture, what a business service is, how to set up service mapping, and how to perform service mapping using discovery.
Chapter 8, Monitoring Using Event Management, deals with event management architecture; setting up the MID Server for event management; exploring event sources and properties; how to configure alert rules, threshold rules, and event transform rules; and exploring the dashboard.
This book assumes the reader has a good understanding of the Linux operating system, basic knowledge of cloud computing and big data, and some experience with OpenStack software. The book will go through a simple multi-node setup of the OpenStack environment, which may require a basic understanding of networking and virtualization concepts. If you have experience of Hadoop and Spark processes, this is a big plus. Although the book uses VirtualBox, feel free to use any other lab environment, such as a VMware workstation or other tools.
OpenStack can be installed and runs either on bare metal or a virtual machine. However, this book requires that you have enough resources for the whole setup. The minimum hardware or virtual requirements are as follows:
- CPU: 4 cores
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Disk space: 80 GB
In this book, you will need the following software:
- Linux Operating System: Centos 7.x
- VirtualBox
- OpenStack RDO distribution, preferably the Liberty release. If you intend to use the Juno or Kilo releases, make sure to change the plugin versions when launching clusters to comply with the correct supported OpenStack version.
Internet connectivity is required to install the necessary OpenStack packages, Sahara images and Sahara image packages for specific plugins.
To make use of the content of this book, a basic prior knowledge of ServiceNow is expected. If you feel you do not have that knowledge, it is always possible to catch up on the basic requirements by quickly reading up on the major components at the ServiceNow wiki page (http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Main_Page#gsc.tab=0). This covers the latest updates on ServiceNow Istanbul and future releases. This book provides an overview of the ITOM applications and setting up ITOM's capabilities, using a quick and detailed guided setup. If you currently work with other toolsets, this book also gives you an idea of how ITOM is handled in ServiceNow.
In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "Credentials are encrypted automatically with a fixed instance key when they are submitted or updated in the credentials (discovery_credentials) table."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "Now right-click onWindows and right-click on 32 bit, and then download to the server or the local machine where you are going to install the MID Server."
Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book-what you liked or disliked. Reader feedback is important for us as it helps us develop titles that you will really get the most out of. To send us general feedback, simply e-mail [email protected], and mention the book's title in the subject of your message. If there is a topic that you have expertise in and you are interested in either writing or contributing to a book, see our author guide at www.packtpub.com/authors.
Now that you are the proud owner of a Packt book, we have a number of things to help you to get the most from your purchase.
We also provide you with a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. The color images will help you better understand the changes in the output. You can download this file from https://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/ServiceNowITOperationsManagement_ColorImages.pdf.
Although we have taken every care to ensure the accuracy of our content, mistakes do happen. If you find a mistake in one of our books-maybe a mistake in the text or the code-we would be grateful if you could report this to us. By doing so, you can save other readers from frustration and help us improve subsequent versions of this book. If you find any errata, please report them by visiting http://www.packtpub.com/submit-errata, selecting your book, clicking on the Errata Submission Form link, and entering the details of your errata. Once your errata are verified, your submission will be accepted and the errata will be uploaded to our website or added to any list of existing errata under the Errata section of that title.
To view the previously submitted errata, go to https://www.packtpub.com/books/content/support and enter the name of the book in the search field. The required information will appear under the Errata section.
Piracy of copyrighted material on the Internet is an ongoing problem across all media. At Packt, we take the protection of our copyright and licenses very seriously. If you come across any illegal copies of our works in any form on the Internet, please provide us with the location address or website name immediately so that we can pursue a remedy.
Please contact us at [email protected] with a link to the suspected pirated material.
We appreciate your help in protecting our authors and our ability to bring you valuable content.
If you have a problem with any aspect of this book, you can contact us at [email protected], and we will do our best to address the problem.