Superna Broadens Integration with ServiceNow ITSM Dashboards

The backbone of modern IT orchestration and service delivery depends on IT Service Management (ITSM) solutions. ITSM products cover a wide range of functions but a core function is to enable service dashboards that provide a view of the health of an organization’s IT services. This requires robust IT change management capabilities linked to the services and underlying IT assets in which the service depends. A crucial function of this dashboard is the ability to root cause service-impacting issues based on service dependencies and relationships between various IT components.

A simple example of a file share service would be delivered using Ethernet switches, routers, DNS servers, and the underlying NAS device. In a degraded or outage scenario any one of these components could have a service-impacting issue. The relationship between the components and data flow mapping enables rapid identification of the root cause. This allows IT to root cause faster and offer better Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for critical IT services.

What are the keys to a successful ITSM Service Dashboard?

1. Dynamic service state within the ITSM dashboard, reflecting the current state of IT services and the underlying dependencies on the infrastructure
2. Configuration Management Database (CMDB) integration is key to enabling IT asset discovery, control, and managing relationships between IT assets that deliver key services. This is the foundation of all ITSM solutions and requires tight integration with 3rd party IT technology providers.
3. CMDB Synchronization Automation helps ensure device health (faults, failures, capacity, etc.) are continuously updated in the CMDB. This helps ensure that IT managers always have up-to-date information for making decisions and reacting to service failures.

How can ITSM integrations enable service dashboards?

A service dashboard pulls data from the CMDB, including the dependencies of IT infrastructure that comprise the service. It displays this information visually along with the current health status.

A service dashboard for SMB or NFS file services allows IT to monitor the state of these services and the impact of changes in the infrastructure that affect availability or performance of file services.

File Service Model in a CMDB

ServiceNow Service Dashboard

How does Superna Integrate with ServiceNow?

Superna DR Manager collects detailed information from Dell PowerScale storage (capacity, nodes, serial number, SMB/NFS shares, quotas) and combines this information with real-time, multi-site Disaster Recovery state of data availability on a per SMB/NFS basis. This data is provided in xml format and imported to ServiceNow’s CMDB on a continuous basis.

The DR state of SMB/NFS shares – combined with the status between primary and secondary data centers – allows ServiceNow customers to build a dynamic file service dashboard that reflects the current health and DR status of the service.

Key Benefits

1. Leveraging Superna’s native ServiceNow CMDB integration, customers can take full advantage of ServiceNow capabilities
2. Better change management decisions with full end-to-end mapping between dependant IT infrastructure
3. Faster root cause identification of file service failures with full CMDB relationships between users/applications, network equipment and the storage layer.
4. Improved risk management of business-critical application services and the underlying infrastructure
5. Improved compliance due to security controls being applied to all components that comprise a service under regulatory supervision.

For a detailed guide on how to integrate Superna’s DR Manager into ServiceNow, go here.

About ServiceNow

ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW) offers a market-leading cloud‑based platform and solutions to help digitize and unify organizations so that they can find smarter, faster, better ways to make work flow.

About Superna

Superna is an industry leader in managing, protecting and securing file and object data across hybrid cloud environments. With global operations and thousands of customers across all verticals, Superna delivers a scalable, secure and easy-to orchestrate-platform to secure data wherever it lives.