Part one in a multi-part series
Summary: ServiceNow automates business workflows. InsightFinder complements ServiceNow by automating infrastructure management to prevent downtime. InsightFinder predicts future incidents and enriches detected incidents with contextual information. It integrates with ServiceNow Orchestration to remediate issues before users are impacted.
With more than 7,000 customers globally, ServiceNow has rapidly become the enterprise standard for workflow automation. What started in 2007 as an easier way to manage IT service for employees in the cloud has become the de facto platform for automating all internal processes including HR, finance, and security operations. Increasingly, ServiceNow customers use it to manage external customer requests as well and also develop custom applications.
Any process where a request is made and some business rules are used to route it for fulfillment is a good candidate for automation in ServiceNow. A new frontier for ServiceNow is automated resolution of employee requests via its orchestration engine, integration hub, and event management capabilities. The company has made 17 acquisitions since 2013 to expand into complementary domains including mobile app dev, business intelligence, and, most recently, robotic process automation.
Most enterprise IT organizations have both service teams supporting employees and infrastructure teams supporting machines. Historically, ServiceNow’s strength has been helping service teams deliver and manage end-user facing technologies like email, WiFi, telephony, and system access. ServiceNow customers have relied on other technologies for infrastructure management.
That is changing fast. Increasingly, ServiceNow customers are making end-user services “infrastructure-aware” by enriching service tickets with context from monitoring and event correlation systems. ServiceNow offers some of these capabilities via its IT Operations Management suite of applications but often relies on partners for infrastructure automation.
Customers constantly ask: “I get world-class service management from ServiceNow… where do I get world-class infrastructure management so I can reduce the volume of issues that impact users?” The answer is InsightFinder.
A new category of AI-first monitoring solutions for IT operations, often called “AIOps”, has emerged to detect anomalies in machine data, predict future incidents before they occur, and diagnose root causes when they do. Unlike native capabilities from ServiceNow, InsightFinder was designed to solve the four hard problems associated with monitoring machine data at scale that constrain innovation from legacy monitoring and APM vendors:
- Anomaly detection across metrics and logs: outages are rooted in signals from anomalous metrics combined with unstructured log data.
- High dimensionality: millions of dimensions – the product of high volumes of nodes and metrics per node – and sparse data per dimension make it difficult for traditional anomaly detection algorithms to accurately detect anomalies.
- Data fluctuation: what’s “normal” fluctuates based on seasonality, change windows, new data architectures, and the introduction of new services. Static thresholds and manual rules generate false positives as “normal” patterns change.
- Performance and scalability: as the volume of machine data grows exponentially, infrastructure monitoring systems need to be architected to ingest hundreds of thousands of concurrent metrics and typically more than 1TB of log data per day.
InsightFinder is the first solution to complement ServiceNow’s service management strengths with patented accurate anomaly detection, incident prediction, and root cause analysis that is day-one ready to enrich front office issue tracking with back office intelligence. In future posts, we’ll describe how ServiceNow and InsightFinder have partnered to accelerate the digital future.
To learn more about the power of InsightFinder and ServiceNow, request a demo to speak to our team.
