Blog

Nutanix at ServiceNow Knowledge 2021 Conference 

By Mayank Gupta & Paul Harb

May 12, 2021 | min

We are excited to be Sponsors at the ServiceNow® digital conference Knowledge 2021 on May 11-20 to share with customers of ServiceNow and Nutanix why this integration matters and how they can best leverage it.. Over the years we have continued to build a more robust integration with ServiceNow, and we continue to educate our customers about the benefits of integrating ServiceNow and Nutanix.

Why Nutanix and ServiceNow? Why Now? 

The coming together of two best-of-breed products allows customers to combine the power of invisible infrastructure with digital workflows to simplify the delivery of applications, improve resilience, and reduce costs. 

Some of our largest customers are already using the ServiceNow and Nutanix integration to onboard their community of end-users and deliver IT-as-Service. Their IT teams have put in place approved processes for incident, problem, and change management as well as for management approvals of new provisioning requests. We hope that more and more IT teams will adopt this integration as they discover the power and simplicity combining the solutions. 

Cloud Made Simple

In a blog from 2020 IDC's references a CEO study, 80% of respondents mentioned "using data in advanced decision models to affect performance and competitive advantage" as a strategic priority. IT teams need the visibility into the metrics of infrastructure and other critical data that can come from monitor Snapshots to help make informed decisions for IT and business leaders.  

ServiceNow supports auto-Discovery of Nutanix HCI and updates Configuration Management Database (CMDB) for a real-time asset map. This gives end-users a single pane of glass to view the Nutanix topology data for their hypervisor solutions (AHV or VMware ESXi). Similarly, any updates to the infrastructure such as clusters, hosts, discs, VMs, storage pools, security groups and more, are also reflected in real-time within the CMDB. The auto-discovery features show relationships between infrastructure components in near real-time visibility via event-driven discovery. 

Integrations:

  1. Alerts Integration
  2. AIOPs & Automation
  3. Application Request Management
  4. Governance with Nutanix & ServiceNow
  5. Automate Database Management

Alerts Integration

In a recent 2021, IDC Intelligent Automation Survey, it was found that in 38% of the instances, the top benefits to support observability was the “Ability to rapidly identify and communicate business problems through the use of monitoring”. Thus monitoring the health of the underlying infrastructure is equally as important as understanding its topology. 

Consistent with the discovery of infrastructure by ServiceNow, the pre-configured integration and infrastructure alerts from Nutanix can be pushed into the ServiceNow events table.  The ServiceNow Event Management module can then correlate incidents based on rules configured in ServiceNow to act on these alerts, simplifying the task of resolving alerts. 

AIOps & Automation

Gartner’s 2020 Strategic Roadmap for Compute Infrastructure, predicts that by 2025, 60% of organizations will use automation tools to deploy new compute resources, reduce deployment time, and deliver greater agility. But the main barriers to gaining value from automation across enterprises are the challenges with integrating across multiple existing monitoring and automation tools. 

Nutanix customers can use the webhook triggered from ServiceNow to automate incident resolution for their infrastructure. This creates a virtuous cycle, where alerts from Nutanix can be pushed into ServiceNow, and then, following the best practices of change or incident management, requests can be filed from ServiceNow to remediate infrastructure issues.

Fig 1: Virtuous cycle, where alerts from Nutanix can be pushed into ServiceNow and ServiceNow Actions can remediate infrastructure issues.

Application Request Management 

Fully integrated into the Nutanix platform, Calm orchestrates the provisioning and scaling of infrastructure and applications, letting teams start from pure Infra-aaS to more agile Application-aaS across hybrid and multi-clouds. The Nutanix Calm automation’s plug-in for ServiceNow can launch Calm blueprints or MPIs in the ServiceNow platform as service catalog items. 

This plug-in allows for the control of resources by using IT Services Management (ITSM) and IT Operations Management (ITOM) processes that are defined by the customers in ServiceNow to reduce the time in the Nutanix Marketplace. As Calm supports hybrid and multi-cloud deployment of applications, the same can now be achieved via a ServiceNow request, leading to better and more suitable cloud and faster app provisioning for decisions and outcomes.

Fig 2: Calm plugin for ServiceNow can handle all the backend orchestration and provisioning details, as the End-users request applications via a ServiceNow Catalog.

Governance with Nutanix and ServiceNow

By integrating with Nutanix Beam, our solution for cost governance and security compliance, ServiceNow users can easily create ServiceNow tickets for public cloud cost savings through resource right-sizing and clean up.  

For example, IT teams can limit unintended public cloud consumption, which often leads to significant budget overages. With this integration, customers can automatically pull Nutanix Beam’s cost and security optimization recommendations into existing ServiceNow workflows. This will automatically create tickets based on cost savings recommendations and security vulnerability alerts and assign them to an appropriate owner. 

Fig 3: Easily create ServiceNow tickets to improve Security by fixing resource misconfigurations and other integrations illustrated

Automate Database Management

Nutanix Era enables database management by providing simple, fast, and consistent management from a single control plane, for public, private, or hybrid clouds. With the Era plugin for ServiceNow, teams can dramatically improve uptime, reduce tedious and manual administrative operations.

The integration enables ServiceNow to discover and map the Nutanix Era PaaS platform and discover all the databases being hosted. Databases can also be ordered and provisioned in the ServiceNow catalog through this integration for Day-1 operation. For Day-2 Operation, we support the ordering of Nutanix Era Time Machine SnapShot from the ServiceNow catalog.  

Summary 

As we share the details of the integrations for ServiceNow, we have created a comprehensive solution for our customers to combine the power of invisible infrastructure with digital workflows. We hope to see you at the Nutanix virtual Booth at   ServiceNow’s Knowledge 2021 Conference to learn more and ask any questions that you may have. 

Next Steps

Take a Test Drive on Nutanix:  https://www.nutanix.com/knowledge

Useful Materials 

Read technical details of Nutanix Integration with ServiceNow

Learn about Nutanix AOS Discovery 

See how to Install and configure the Nutanix Calm plugin for ServiceNow

Installation steps for Era and ServiceNow integration

Technote on alert remediation with Nutanix X-Play and ServiceNow ITSM 

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