5 Reasons to Integrate Lansweepe With Your ServiceNow CMDB
According to Aberdeen Group, the cost of downtime has risen 60% since 2014. Today, each
hour of downtime costs organizations an average of $260,000. Often, the first time that IT knows about a business service outage is when end users complain. Proactively addressing business service outages before they start is essential for making services and helping prevent devastating financial losses.
Quick Summary
An accurate CMDB helps you quickly identify, diagnose, and fix service outages. But what happens if the data stored within the ServiceNow CMDB is incomplete, inaccurate, or out of date?
In this ebook, you’ll learn that:
- Data quality gaps affect business outcomes.
- CMDB accuracy is critical for Service Management & infrastructure teams.
- Achieving an accurate CMDB is only possible with end-to-end automation.
1. IT asset data quality gaps affect business outcomes
Gartner says, “99% of organizations using CMDB tooling that do not confront
configuration item (CI) data quality gaps will experience visible business disruptions.”
Companies need an end-to-end solution to rapidly and easily discover their IT assets
and automatically synchronize the discovered assets into the organizational CMDB.
The asset data and subsequent CMDB/CI data in this end-to-end chain must be accurate, or they risk making decisions or running sub-standard ITIL processes.
Obtaining an accurate, up-to-date view of IT assets and CMDB CIs is impossible if this critical data is maintained manually.
2. CMDB accuracy is critical for Service Management
& infrastructure support teams
A high-performing IT Service Management (ITSM) function is critical to the successful
operation of every IT organization in small, medium, and large enterprises. A Service Management platform like ServiceNow (the world’s leading ITSM platform vendor) is key
to the success of an organization’s ITSM operation, and the most fundamental
component of ServiceNow’s ITSM functionality is the CMDB.
Without an accurate CMDB, all major ITSM processes would break down. This includes critical
processes such as Incident Management, Critical Incident Management, Problem
Management, Change Management, Release Management, and Service Request
Management.
It’s difficult to imagine running a high-performing IT organization without these critical
ITSM processes operating effectively. Yet, without an accurate CMDB, these
upstream processes are seriously degraded. So, what’s required to achieve an
accurate CMDB?
Timeliness
IT assets must be automatically discovered using a rapid-to-deploy, easy-to-maintain product like Lansweeper.
CMDB Configuration Items (CI’s) must be automatically maintained (created and updated) to the maximum extent possible using IT assets found by the discovery product.
Automated and rapid synchronization between the discovery data and the CMDB CI data ensures Service Management functions and infrastructure teams are making decisions on up-to-date data.
Comprehensiveness
The CMDB needs to contain a CI for every deployed IT Asset. Missing CIs leads to missing CI relationships, which creates a significant risk to processes such as Change Management and Critical Incident Management.
Completeness
The maximum number of CI attributes must be populated so support teams perform operations with a complete picture of each CI.
3. IT Service Managers
CMDB managers and IT Infrastructure Managers must treat their CMDB as one of the highest value assets of their organization as an accurate CMDB delivers value beyond the IT organization alone.
HR, risk, governance and compliance and finance functions all benefit trustworthy data in the CMDB as the basis for decision-making:
- Security teams have increased pressure to accommodate work-from-anywhere scenarios to manage end-point security effectively.
- Governance and compliance teams must ensure that their organization follows regulatory requirements like SOX, HIPAA, PCI and others to avoid costly fines.
- Finance teams need complete visibility into current hardware and software information to align financial planning decisions with accurate data.
“ServiceNow is leading the future of work by creating great experiences for businesses. We are pleased to have Lansweeper integrate its own Service Graph Connector to help further enhance satisfaction, build trust, accelerate time to value, and reduce risk for our joint customers.”
4. Achieving an accurate CMDB is only possible with
end-to-end automation
Manually maintaining a CMDB fully or even partially is costly, error-prone and will ultimately undermine the organization’s critical ITSM processes and the effectiveness of Infrastructure Support Teams.
The key to achieving an accurate CMDB relies on automation, in particular from the
following two components:
Automated IT Asset Discovery: This is achieved using Lansweeper’s comprehensive IT discovery and inventory technology, which is deployed rapidly in even the largest organizations.
Automated synchronization of asset data into the CMDB: This is achieved using integration technology, which synchronizes asset information discovered by Lansweeper into your ServiceNow CMDB.
These two components ensure that new or changed IT assets are rapidly discovered and persisted in the CMDB, with comprehensive attribute information maintained against each CI.
Most importantly, the CMDB automatically derives, creates, and maintains key relationships between infrastructure CIs.
Lansweeper’s low-cost and fast-to-implement discovery technology, combined with the Lansweeper-to-CMDB integration applications described below, enables organizations to rapidly achieve a highly accurate CMDB and deliver dramatically improved value to stakeholders across the business.
IT organizations will experience fewer unplanned outages, reduced time-to-restore services when managing critical incidents, and improved quality of service request delivery to internal customers.
“Organizations are increasingly looking for ways to get more value out of their technology investments. It’s essential this data is up-to-date and complete. By integrating our automated IT asset discovery platform organizations can let our agentless discovery and credential-free recognition capabilities help them in keeping their CMDB accurate and up-to-date, automatically. This benefits them not only in accuracy but also in reducing manual workload, thus freeing up resources to work on mission-critical tasks.”
5. Lansweeper + ServiceNow: a simple yet powerful combination
The above can be achieved through rapid and straightforward integration between Lansweeper and ServiceNow.
Lansweeper’s agentless IT asset discovery and inventory platform provides complete visibility into an organization’s current IT estate, enabling accurate data that system admins can populate into their CMDBs. The integration between Lansweeper and ServiceNow ensures that all the IT asset data is accurate, current, and automatically synchronized with ServiceNow to achieve high-quality and automated CMDB data.
Business disruptions resulting from poorly maintained data are reduced significantly, allowing company leaders to rest assured that there are no gaps in their mission-critical IT asset data as they make business decisions for security, finance, governance compliance, and more.
Before and after: the Lansweeper difference
What was it like maintaining ServiceNow’s CMDB before Lansweeper? Here’s a before-and-after summary:
Before
Before the integration with Lansweeper, ServiceNow users often had incomplete asset visibility and had to perform manual input and management tasks to keep the CMDB up-to-date. Installing agents on devices was necessary for tracking them, requiring manual configuration. Unfortunately, due to all the slow, manual updates and configuration requirements, IT teams often had to work with stale and duplicate data and manually correlate it to ensure accuracy and completeness.
After
Lansweeper’s integration with ServiceNow enables data sharing and workflows driven by a single source of truth. This centralized IT asset inventory is always complete, accurate, and up-to-date. Lansweeper data is automatically synced with ServiceNow, eliminating all manual tasks associated with collecting, inputting, and updating IT asset data in the CMDB. No agent installations or credentials are needed. Lansweeper’s agentless scanning works across all devices – IT, OT, and IoT – for agentless, credential-free discovery.
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