ITOM 101 - What is ITOM and why do you need it?

[Dawn Jurek]

ServiceNow's IT Service Management solution helps you round up and take control of all the wayward service processes meandering throughout your enterprise, and turn them into efficient automated processes. But services are just one part of the picture - what about managing your operations?

Are you proactively preventing service outages, or are you caught off-guard when one pops up and stops everything in its tracks? And what about managing your hybrid clouds? Can users access the cloud services they need, without incurring runaway costs and increasing risk?

Did you know that you can proactively eliminate service outages and manage your hybrid clouds with ServiceNow IT Operations Management?

In this installment of our NOWSupport best practices series, we take a quick tour of the applications that make up ITOM, and provide you with resources to learn more, including our our Getting Started with ITOM video playlist on our NOWsupport YouTube channel.

What is ITOM?

IT Operations Management in ServiceNow is a suite of applications that work together to automate operations management within your organization. 

 

What is Discovery?

Discovery uses a process called horizontal discovery to find applications and devices on your network and the important attributes of those devices. It updates the configuration management database (CMDB) with the information it finds, but does not draw relationships between Configuration Items (CI) that are part of specific business services.

Learn more about planning for and setting up Discovery in our Discovery videos: 

What is Service Mapping?

Service Mapping provides a complimentary capability to Discovery, by using top-down mapping to find and map CIs that are part of a business service, such as an email service. This allows you to visualize all CIs that are used to deliver a service. 

Event Management and Operational Intelligence

Event Management and Operational Intelligence help your IT team monitor the health of the system, anticipate and prevent outages, and resolve issues quickly, with minimal impact to your operations.  

 

What is Event Management?

Event Management collects and analyzes events to identify and prevent potential service outages.

What is Operational Intelligence?

Operational Intelligence collects and analyzes performance metrics to identify and prevent potential service outages. It uses historical threshold data to indicate anomalous behavior of CIs which may not be captured by events.

Learn more about both Event Management and Operational Intelligence in our overview video:

What is Cloud Management?

Cloud Management allows you to provide self-service access to cloud resources, while enforcing good governance and compliance with business policies. You also gain visibility into cloud costs and optimize spending. 

Learn more about Cloud Management in our introduction video: 

For more information

To learn more about ITOM in ServiceNow, check out all the videos in our Getting Started with ITOM playlist on our NOWSupport YouTube channel, starting with this one: 

IT Operations Management (product documentation)

Discovery (product documentation)

Service Mapping (product documentation) 

Event Management (product documentation) 

Operational Intelligence (product documentation) 

Cloud Management (product documentation) 

--

Behind the scenes here at ServiceNow, the Knowledge Management and Multimedia teams work closely with subject matter experts to disseminate critical information to our customers. We've found that certain topics come up frequently, in the form of best practices that can help you keep your ServiceNow instances running smoothly. This series targets those topics so that you and your organization can benefit from our collective expertise. If you have a best practices topic you'd like us to cover in this series, please let us know in the comments below.

To access all of the blog posts in this series, see our NOWSupport best practices series list.