Project Description
Industry: Retail/Grocery/Pharmacy
Size: Large/Enterprise
Task: Discovery and Service Mapping
Duration of the project: 10 months
Project Overview
ConfigureTek conducted the implementation and configuration of ServiceNow discovery and proprietary service mapping factory methodology to replace a manually maintained CMDB, for a large retail grocery/pharmacy chain in 10 weeks.
The project resulted in improved CMDB usability and visibility of physical and virtual configuration items related to critical business services as well as reduced outage downtime due to rapid root cause analysis of service-related events.
ConfigureTek’s Approach
• Conducted workshops to provide guidance on foundational CMDB configuration and concepts
• Conducted an in-depth analysis of existing CIs to enable methodical discovery rollout
• Built out processes to remediate credentials, permissions and access issues for discovery and service mapping
• Presented the fundamentals of Service Mapping and establish a framework for all Business Services
• Worked with customer to send out questionnaire emails and mine data repositories for necessary information to complete service mapping
• Created service portal request to facilitate service mapping on-boarding
• Completed Service Maps based on entry points and connections defined in the CMDB, questionnaire emails, and mined from other data repositories
• Validated each Service Map with the SME’s to ensure every dependency was captured accurately
• Requested and captured sign-off within ServiceNow to ensure a complete electronic trail for future reference and continued use of each business service map
• Operationalized the Service Maps to allow them to be used throughout the ServiceNow platform
Challenges
The customer had manually populated their CMDB with untrusted, outdated and inaccurate data that was maintained manually. The tedious, time-consuming task to enter and/or update the relationships between Hardware infrastructure and Applications/Services was prone to errors and made event, alert and incident management for any business service very difficult to resolve.
Project tasks included:
• Implementing ServiceNow discovery for two large data centers and private cloud environment
• Deploying service mapping factory/lifecycle for rapid service mapping development
• Create service maps for critical services with monitoring through event management
Results
• Customer has capabilities to discover their physical data centers, and private cloud environment to help understand dependencies, relationships and enable asset management
• Customer has visibility into what Business Services each of the servers in their production data center is supporting
• Ability to improve operations by correlating monitoring events to business impact in reduced time
• Ability to cut through the noise and determine root cause of outages by leveraging discovery, service mapping and event management
• Ability to bridge technology domains and accelerate root cause identification during times of outages
Why ConfigureTek
ConfigureTek is focused on helping customers achieve full benefit from the proper implementation of their Discovery, CMDB, Business Service Mapping, Asset and Service Management solutions. Our methodologies/best practices are developed so that our customers achieve maximum business value in the shortest time frames across these critical IT functions.
We have worked with hundreds of companies over the past 10 years and our abilities to work with solutions from multiple software vendors (ServiceNow, HPE, VMware, etc.) makes us unique in our ability to deliver on customer expectations. Contact the ConfigureTek experts to better understand how we can leverage our experience and knowledge to help assess your company’s CMDB today!
