How to get the most from your ITSM monitoring integrations?
Before talking about integration, let’s take a look at your non-automated Service Management processes. There isn’t a right or wrong answer as this varies based on your needs, think through the below questions to get a perspective on how tasks flow within your company today:
Do you handle “This is broken” and “I need XYZ” differently?
Does one team handle all inbound responses for triage?
Are reoccurring “This is broken” issues tracked together?
Do you plan and schedule infrastructure changes?
Starting simple
Even without complex routing, getting monitoring events recorded and responded to is an important step. If you don’t have any monitoring integration, I’d suggest starting small and simple. Pick one or two events with a clear need and start by introducing those into your support process. The key here is that it is one or two events/alerts and they are clearly actionable, such as “Server turned off” and “Public website unavailable” would be good places to start.
Growing into the process
If you answered YES to all of the questions above and have a built-out ITSM process, it’s time to take a look at some of the more specific flows available in the ITIL process. The examples below speak to generic monitoring situations, all of which apply to SCOM and other monitoring tools.
Incidents
This is likely where everything started being dumped, and we can work from there. Per process, Incidents are “an unplanned interruption to a service or the failure of a component of a service.” which means quite simply, “it’s broken”.
Problems
Do you keep seeing a similar incident repeatedly? If so, you should record this as a problem and link your incidents up to keep track. If the same thing breaks every Tuesday morning, there is likely a root cause at the source. Every Tuesday you should create a new Incident, but these should all be linked to a single Problem ticket, which will help you get to the root of the problem.
Change Request
Low disk space warning? Nothings broken yet, but you know it could be if things keep going. You don’t have an outage, and thus don’t have an Incident, but these types of issues shouldn’t be overlooked, as you’ll end up with an Incident down the road. This is where the change request comes in, a Change Request allows your ITSM process to track work that is needed in order to keep services stable.
Alert Sync Success
Cookdown has an integration solution that can manage all of the above for you. Alert Sync is quick and straightforward to set up and will seamlessly turn your SCOM Alerts into actionable ServiceNow Incidents. Alert Sync makes managing alerts and incidents so much simpler and will ensure your ITSM monitoring is fully ITIL compliant. To find about more about Alert Sync or download a free 30-day trial head over to >>> cookdown.com/alert-sync
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