ServiceNow Simplified

SPM stands for Strategic Portfolio Management. Every company has a bunch of projects that it is considering working on. But how would they decide, which projects best align with their overall corporate strategy. To keep things simple, let's assume that their corporate strategy is to work on projects that would help maximize their revenue; in words, projects that would make them the most money.  So how do they pick those out of a bunch? (It might be tempting to say that they should work on all projects that they can think of but that's not always feasible. For some projects, they might not have the skills, some might not be feasible because the expenditure might outweigh the return, some might not give enough ROI etc.) So, they pick projects that they have the skills and the financial capability to work on and that would also help maximize their overall revenue and profit.  Once the right projects have been selected, the company needs to make sure that all of their resources (t...

You can think of Orchestration as a technician who fixes problems. Event Management is what detects the problems, determines the root cause and then calls upon Orchestration to fix that root cause. So, let's say, if a server is running out of HDD space, Orchestration is going to take automatic steps to free up as much space as safely as possible and then it would also inform the IT staff to add another HDD to the server.

Before talking about what Event Management is, we need to understand that in large companies, every device on the network is being monitored by one or more monitoring tools. The main purpose of these monitoring tools is to automatically watch these devices and if something has gone wrong or if something is about to go wrong, generate a (warning or an error) message. These (error/warning) messages are called Events. So why do we need Event Management? We need event management because monitoring tools are not smart.  In a complex network where multiple devices are connected together to perform a single function, when one device fails, the monitoring tool watching it (the failed device) and the monitoring tools watching the other devices (that the failed device was working with) all start generating their own error/warning messages. Although the number of messages is big, the actual problem is just one failed device. Let's try to understand this with the example of the Customer Order ...

The main job of Service Mapping is to determine, which devices on the company network, work together to perform which specific operation. Why is this important? First of all, it is important to understand that in large companies, it takes multiple devices (computers, routers, printers and other devices depending upon the task) to perform one specific operation. For example, the Customer Order System (online shopping platforms, where the customers add stuff to their cart, checkout, make payment and buy stuff etc.) takes multiple machines to run. The front-end of the customer order system might be in one server, the REST API might be in a second server, and the database of the customer order system might be in a third server etc. And these servers are connected together via routers. So, if a router was to fail somewhere in the company, especially in a large company with hundreds of servers and routers, it would be very difficult to determine, which operation would go down with it. Whethe...

Discovery is a submodule of ITOM. The main job of Discovery is to crawl the company's network, find all connected devices (like computers, laptops, routers, printers, anything else connected to the network) and record their data in the ServiceNow database (the CMDB. We'll discuss this in future).  So, what type of information is recorded? It can record a lot of structured and even unstructured information depending upon the device type. For example, for computers, it can record what operating system is on each one, how much RAM and CPU they have, how much HDD space is free and how much is used up, all installed software on each system, open ports, and most importantly, which devices are connected to each other on the network etc. For other devices on the network, their respective data is recorded. But what is the purpose of recording this "bunk" (Lol)? This information becomes very useful for many of the other modules. We'll talk about this in future posts. To sum...

ITOM stands for IT Operations Management. The main purpose of ITOM is to keep an eye on the IT assets (e.g. servers, network and cloud services etc.) of a company and make sure that they remain operational by taking preventive measures to keep them from breaking down. For example, let's say, a company has a server, hosting their official website. And let's say, this server is about to run out of HDD space. ITOM is automatically going to take steps (like automatically deleting temporary files, junk files, old and out of date log file etc.) to free up space on the HDD before the server runs out of space and breaks down. ITOM would also automatically notify the concerned staff to take necessary steps from their end and solve the problem (perhaps by installing a second HDD or a newer, bigger one). In short, ITOM is there to keep an automatic eye on the IT assets of the company to make sure that they do not break down by taking preventive steps. You can think of ITOM as a problem-pr...

SAM stands for Software Asset Management. Again, the main purpose of SAM is to track the usage of Software assets to make sure that the company is getting its money's worth. Since software cost a lot of money. SAM is there to ensure that the company does not overspend on software licenses and in fact, saves money according to their software usage. For example, SAM might track a piece of software on a user's computer and finds out that it has not been used in more than 90 days. This would mean that the software is under-utilized. SAM would automatically revoke the user's license and mark it in the database as an unassigned license. So, in case some other user needs the same software, the company could simply assign that software license to this new user instead of buying a new license, thus saving money. In small companies, this might not seem like much but with companies with thousands of users, this sort of cost can add up really quick. How often does SAM check if a softwa...