Enhanced Integration between IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps and ServiceNow
IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps (CP4AIOps) supports over 150 integrations across chat, events, logs, metrics, topology, and ticketing systems. This article focuses on the robust integration it has with ServiceNow.
ServiceNow is commonly used to manage an organization’s data, systems, and processes. However, it often does not include all the various data sources within the organization. Furthermore, it does not have the level of noise reduction, AI capability, or automation that CP4AIOps has. The CP4AIOps-ServiceNow integration bridges some of these gaps with new capabilities.
Capabilities
- Viewing CP4AIOps incidents and alerts in ServiceNow
- Making bi-directional updates to CP4AIOps incidents and alerts
- Enriching ServiceNow change requests with risk assessments
- Enabling Similar Ticket functionality
- Ingest Topology from ServiceNow
Viewing CP4AIOps incidents and alerts in ServiceNow
CP4AIOps has many methods and configurations relating to issue detection. To learn more about CP4AIOps, Infuse your AIOps platform with intelligent IT operations. In each case, through one of its many avenues of issue detection, CP4AIOps detects a problem and creates an incident.
An incident is comprised of alerts along with additional context and insights. Both the incident and its related alerts are sent over to ServiceNow and received by the IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps ServiceNow application. The app uses a scripted endpoint to efficiently publish the data in three tables: the generic incident table, a custom CP4AIOps incident table, and a custom CP4AIOps alerts table. It then pulls from these tables to create custom UI.
The screenshot that follows shows a ServiceNow incident created by CP4AIOps. Boxed in red are custom tabs created by the CP4AIOps ServiceNow app. The first box displays CP4AIOps specific information for the incident and shows the mapping between the incident in CP4AIOps and the incident in ServiceNow. The second box contains two custom tabs, one for the custom CP4AIOps incidents table (not displayed) and the other for the CP4AIOps alerts table (displayed). Both tabs display some record details and a link to that specific record. This allows users to drill down into alert details and tackle incidents created by CP4AIOps without having to leave ServiceNow. If users want to take advantage of the issue-resolution capabilities in CP4AIOps, they can click the Incident URL and it will take them to the incident view in CP4AIOps.
Making bi-directional updates to CP4AIOps incidents and alerts
As mentioned above, incidents and alerts produced by CP4AIOps are pushed into ServiceNow. Any updates to an incident in CP4AIOps, such as a state change, an additional alert mapping, or an increase in severity, get pushed to ServiceNow as well. Keeping the incidents and alerts up-to-date gives users the details they need to start resolving the issue. Coming in CP4AIOps 4.6.0, ServiceNow users can make changes to CP4AIOps incidents and alerts from within their ServiceNow UI, and those updates will be received and processed by CP4AIOps. This bi-directional update flow ensures that SREs using both systems are looking at the same data. It also allows ServiceNow users to manage CP4AIOps data from their ServiceNow UI. They can increase severity, clear alerts, and closed incidents, all of which will be tracked across both systems.
Enriching change requests with risk assessments
ServiceNow supports change tickets to track change requests and their lifecycle. CP4AIOps can enrich these requests with a risk assessment provided by an AI model. The screenshot that follows shows a change request ticket and boxed in red is a custom tab displaying an assessment and a confidence score.
Change Risk AI training can be conducted within CP4AIOps by ingesting change tickets from a user’s ServiceNow instance. Once training is complete, the AI model can be deployed and used to provide risk assessments on future change tickets. CP4AIOps will poll at a configurable interval for any new change tickets, and push risk assessments to a custom CP4AIOps change risk assessment table. The ServiceNow app will then grab the change risk details from the table and display it in a custom tab under the change ticket as shown above. To learn more about the CP4AIOps algorithm, see About change risk.
Using Similar Ticket functionality
One of the core functionalities of ServiceNow is incident tracking and resolution. CP4AIOps can speed up this process by using AI to provide past examples of similar problems. From these past incidents, CP4AIOps can extract the resolution text and from it, show the specific actions that were taken previously, thus saving the user the time to read and understand each of the incidents. The screenshot that follows is part of an incident message in Slack, created with a CP4AIOps ChatOps integration. Three resolved incidents from ServiceNow were flagged by the AI as similar tickets, and the actions that resolved those incidents are highlighted to make their resolutions easy to identify. If a user is interested in seeing more similar tickets and their resolution actions, a search functionality is provided.
Similar Ticket AI training can be conducted by ingesting resolved ServiceNow incidents. The model is then deployed, and the Similar Ticket functionality becomes available to use in the CP4AIOps UI and CP4AIOps ChatOps integrations (shown above). To learn more about the CP4AIOps algorithm, see About similar tickets.
Ingest Topology from ServiceNow
CP4AIOps supports many different data sources for the topology, including ServiceNow through an observer. This allows clients to have a holistic view across their estate, no matter where they keep track of the resources as CP4AIOps combines resources from all the configured sources into a single topology. For ServiceNow where the data tends to be manual or slowly updated, merging the ServiceNow topology with more dynamic sources allows for a more real-time view of the environment. That topology is used both for inventory and as a source for analytics such as topological correlation, probable cause, and so on.
Conclusion
CP4AIOps uses AI to deliver visibility into performance data and dependencies across environments. It can detect problems proactively and quickly identify resolution actions that lead to increased resiliency of client environments. The CP4AIOps-ServiceNow integration creates a bridge between the two systems that allows some of these insights and capabilities to be accessed from within ServiceNow. CP4AIOps and ServiceNow can not only coexist but can thrive together.
