Automatically map your ServiceNow CMDB

Managing a configuration management database (CMDB) in today’s highly dynamic environments can be a challenge. Do you know how to keep track of all the movement inside these new environments, as well as keep track of those making new applications and deploying them?  For instance, modern microservices infrastructures can contain thousands of business-critical services and related dependencies.  That is a lot of data for operations teams to configure and if being done manually, can be error prone. Inaccurate data in the CMDB can result in significant delays in incident remediation, which slows down IT teams under pressure to move at lightspeed.

As mentioned, the modern IT ecosystem contains tons of data that needs to be analyzed. To ensure the data is correct, there needs to be structure. ServiceNow CMDB provides a single system of record for IT and as technology partners, Dynatrace & Cognizant offer an intelligent and automated solution to maintain quality in the CMDB.

With Dynatrace OneAgent installed in your environment, you get discovery of everything that runs on that machine, including containers.  Dynatrace, through our Smartscape technology, shows how everything is talking to each other across the IT layers, with real-time dependency models that detect deviations from normal behavior.  This is critical in being able to show which component has a problem and get to the root cause.  Cognizant can take the data from Dynatrace and through Cognizant’s Golden CMDB, implement a data reconciliation process.  This allows incidents to be routed to the responsible teams for real-time detection and response to eliminate IT service outages.

Cognizant also provides the intelligent event management architecture to consolidate the network generated events and reduce the noise, enabling your support teams to focus on the issues that need your immediate attention. Moreover, by leveraging the Cognizant’s Orchestration pack, customers can embark on the self-healing and auto-remediation journey.

Dynatrace and Cognizant provide an architecture to seamlessly integrate with ServiceNow Event Management, providing business service health in a single dashboard.  With event entries being sent by Dynatrace and processed through Cognizant, Event Management can link to the relevant CIs in the CMDB and aggregate event/alert information based on those CI relationships.  With these solutions working together, you have the ability to be proactive in eliminating disruption to your business and can:

• Prioritize critical business services being impacted.
• Detect anomalies through artificial intelligence capabilities.
• Determine service outages efficiently with root-cause problem detection.

We’ve simplified the direct integration of your monitored environment with your ServiceNow CMDB by providing a free app!  Install the Dynatrace ServiceNow app within your own ServiceNow environment to directly synchronize the list of automatically discovered hosts, applications, and services with your ServiceNow instance.

About the Cognizant contributors:

Mukesh Gupta has worked in the IT Service Management industry for over 10 years, gaining experience and specialization in Product Design, Consulting, Project Management and B2C Sales.

Praveen Challa is the Director and Chief Architect with Cognizant Infrastructure Services heading ServiceNow practice for North America. He brings to the table over 14 years of consulting and infrastructure experience across heterogeneous platforms.