Managing highly dynamic, microservices-based environments with a CMDB database can be challenging. IT operations teams can struggle just to get full visibility into what’s happening, let alone to pinpoint the root causes of problems.
This is why we are excited to announce that Dynatrace has joined ServiceNow’s Service Graph Connector Program. The Service Graph Connector for Dynatrace provides the complete service map of your environment, and impact tree in case one of the Service map entities get impacted. This saves teams time and resources, enabling them to focus on higher-value initiatives including driving digital transformation and delivering seamless experiences for customers.
Enhancements to Dynatrace ServiceNow integration
The new Service Graph Connector enhances the integration between ServiceNow and the Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform. By delivering closed-loop, automated IT Operations Management (ITOM) workflows with AI-assistance, this ensures smarter answers and precise topology and service mapping for your multi-cloud environment.
The further enhanced Dynatrace ‘Applications’ layer helps you align your CMDB with ServiceNow’s new Common Service Data Model 2.0 (CSDM 2.0), and allows you to map your Dynatrace entities correctly in ServiceNow.
The newly introduced service-to-service horizontal relationships filled with the Dynatrace Service Flow information help you expand the impact tree in ServiceNow and easily connect the dots when a service is impacted.
Hit the ground running with the new guided setup.
CMDB data quality is further improved by the enhanced Identification and Reconciliation engine (IRE) in ServiceNow.
Understand all dependencies in your cloud stack with the Dynatrace Service Graph Connector
Based on user feedback, we restructured the current Dynatrace Integration application and have one app dedicated to CMDB integration. This means that you now have more fine-grained control for CMDB integration with the new Service Graph connector for Dynatrace
The Dynatrace Service Graph connector goes beyond event notification to understanding all the dependencies in your full cloud stack. Dynatrace Smartscape enriches ServiceNow Service Graph with real-time topology information, including deep application and infrastructure discovery, which provides teams with a real-time, always accurate understanding of their dynamic multi-cloud environments. This provides ServiceNow with more than just an alert that an issue has occurred; the provided detail enables ServiceNow to automatically create a ticket and execute a remediation workflow.
Note: The Service Graph connector for Dynatrace has dependencies to licensed modules within ServiceNow, such as ITOM license, ITOM Discovery license, and Integration commons for CMDB, which need to be downloaded from the ServiceNow Plugins module.
Easily map your Dynatrace entities based on the new CSDM 2.0 data model
To help you align your CMDB with the new ServiceNow Common Service Data Model 2.0 (CSDM 2.0), and to allow you to map your Dynatrace entities correctly in your CMDB, we’ve integrated the Dynatrace ‘Applications’ layer and reclassified it as ‘Application Services’ in ServiceNow.
Note: This layer was previously called ‘Business Applications’.
See when a service is impacted with a holistic view into service-to-service relationships
In this release, we’ve introduced service-to-service horizontal relationships that are enriched with Dynatrace Service Flow information. This helps you to both expand the impact tree in ServiceNow and to benefit from Service Flow in Dynatrace. When Dynatrace detects that a service is impacted, it shows up in ServiceNow, giving you a holistic dependency view of the upstream and downstream potential impact. Thus, you can easily connect the dots when a service is impacted.
Seamless onboarding experience with guided setup
We’ve introduced a guided ServiceNow setup feature to ease the configuration steps required for the integration. This helps you save time and hit the ground running. Use this guided setup to quickly access the ServiceNow modules and Dynatrace pages that are pertinent to the integration.
Easy handling of Dynatrace data using the enhanced IRE in ServiceNow
ServiceNow’s IRE (Identification and Reconciliation Engine) provides a centralized framework for performing identification and reconciliation processes across different data sources. In this release, we’ve incorporated the enhanced version of the IRE that ServiceNow released in their Orlando version. In addition to providing the functionality of the createOrUpdateCI() method, this approach also supports:
- Handling partial payloads
- Handling partial commits
- Removing duplicate items within a payload
- Generating output summaries
The ServiceNow IRE provides better management of Dynatrace monitoring data through the reduction of duplicates and the addition of detail required to complete any partial payloads.
For more details about the enhanced IRE, see ServiceNow documentation.
Other improvements
Both earlier versions and the current version of the Dynatrace ServiceNow integration allow for hosts to have custom names or FQDN in Dynatrace. However, starting with the current version, we aim to match detected hosts that are analyzed by Dynatrace with the entities that are included in the ServiceNow CMDB. We use a script include in ServiceNow to facilitate this (only host names that are discovered by Dynatrace are integrated into ServiceNow). This helps to reduce duplicate CIs on the Dynatrace side.
Summary
The new Service Graph Connector has enhancements that improve data integrity and completeness in the CMDB with the help of the enhanced IRE. This approach handles incoming Dynatrace data more efficiently. We also improved Service Mapping for Services that originate from Dynatrace, thus helping to connect the dots when a service is impacted. This version of the app is compatible with the Orlando and Paris versions of ServiceNow.
What’s next
- The Quebec version of the ServiceNow integration uses the new Dynatrace Environment v2 API, which exposes many more entity types from Dynatrace and helps enrich your CMDB further.
- In close partnership with ServiceNow, we’re also planning to improve further the Service Graph Connector for CMDB integration by enhancing performance, continue expansion and enrichment and leverage more of ServiceNow’s future release features.
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