Leveraging Data Infrastructure Insights for enhanced IT service management with ServiceNow

I’ve had the pleasure of working alongside many amazing IT professionals throughout my career. A common chat topic is “finding ways to integrate our different systems, making everything easier to manage, and keeping an eye on things.”

ServiceNow often stands out in these conversations for its strong capabilities in unifying IT services and operations, enabling businesses to automate tasks and streamline IT workflows. However, another tool that has increasingly become an ideal partner for ServiceNow is NetApp^® Data Infrastructure Insights.

This blog post focuses on the collaboration between ServiceNow and Data Infrastructure Insights. It explains how this collaboration can help IT teams manage their infrastructure more efficiently, enabling strategic automation and optimization. By letting our tools do the heavy lifting, we can focus on enhancing our business strategies and outcomes. So, let’s dive in.

Data Infrastructure Insights is a NetApp service that plays a crucial role in transforming conventional data centers into advanced and flexible intelligent data infrastructures.

It offers comprehensive monitoring of your environment and gathers various types of data metrics, logs, events, annotations, objects/assets, and application data.

After ingesting this data, Data Infrastructure Insights applies a common data model, simplifying and categorizing the data. It then builds a topology that provides an expansive view of the entire IT environment. These capabilities enable Data Infrastructure Insights to perform correlations and analysis at scale, extracting insights that can be accessed through a REST API. Moreover, application IDs can also flow into Data Infrastructure Insights, adding context to the operations and enhancing the richness of the data.

When ServiceNow, known for its robust capabilities in unifying IT services and operations, integrates with NetApp Data Infrastructure Insights, IT teams gain distinct benefits:

• Asset and configuration management. By feeding real-time information about storage and infrastructure assets into ServiceNow’s configuration management database, Data Infrastructure Insights helps you maintain a consistently updated inventory and infrastructure topology that maps the relationships between containers, compute resources, and storage. Precise, real-time synchronization reduces manual efforts that are prone to errors and keeps decision-making accurate and timely in increasingly dynamic IT environments.
• Automated incident management. AI-detected anomalies, specific log events, or threshold breaches in metrics can trigger alerts in Data Infrastructure Insights, which then automatically create incidents in ServiceNow. Alerts include a URL to Data Infrastructure Insights, providing teams with direct access to detailed context and insights into the issue. This integration accelerates troubleshooting, reduces mean time to resolution (MTTR), improves overall service availability, and offers a common platform on which IT teams can collaborate effectively.
• Enhanced change management. Details from Data Infrastructure Insights about the potential impacts of planned changes on your infrastructure can be seamlessly integrated into ServiceNow’s change management module. This proactive approach reduces downtime and enhances operational resilience.
• Improved visibility and collaboration: Integration allows Data Infrastructure Insights data to feed into ServiceNow, granting different IT teams greater visibility into the infrastructure’s health. Data Infrastructure Insights can generate detailed reports and automatically send them to ServiceNow, so that all relevant parties are informed and up to date. This enhanced visibility improves collaboration, leading to a more resilient and high-performing IT environment.

The integration process between Data Infrastructure Insights and ServiceNow harnesses two key components: REST APIs and webhooks.

REST APIs are the communication bridge between ServiceNow and Data Infrastructure Insights, enabling a seamless real-time data exchange. Through REST APIs, Data Infrastructure Insights imparts knowledge about your infrastructure to ServiceNow, offering deeper insights into the relationships between components such as containers, VMs, applications, and storage entities. When you’re planning changes to any component, Data Infrastructure Insights can evaluate the potential impact and share this crucial data with ServiceNow.

Webhooks, a central feature of Data Infrastructure Insights, dispatch real-time alerts to ServiceNow. These alerts, prompted by factors such as anomaly detection, log events, or threshold breaches in metrics, can autonomously trigger the creation of an incident in ServiceNow.

Because these alerts link directly to Data Infrastructure Insights, even non-expert team members can troubleshoot effectively, which helps teams collaborate and speeds incident resolution. This integration reduces disjointed processes and tools and allows teams to access insights quickly. The result is more efficiency, less downtime, and a more cohesive view of the IT infrastructure, helping teams convert challenges into opportunities.

The integration of Data Infrastructure Insights and ServiceNow isn’t just a connection between two services. Instead, it’s a strategic alignment that enhances operational efficiency, reduces MTTR, and makes IT infrastructure flexible enough to adapt to your organization’s changing requirements. Whether you’re already using ServiceNow and considering Data Infrastructure Insights or you’re a current Data Infrastructure Insights user looking to derive maximum value, this integration should be an essential component of your strategic IT planning.

For more information, explore our Data Infrastructure Insights webpage.