Taking Action with ServiceNow: Cloud-Like Delivery of IT Infrastructure Services

So, let me take a wild guess — your organization probably has ServiceNow. That’s great, because it’s excellent at delivering all types of IT Process automation, self-service portals, change request and ticket management and documentation powered by a team of busy developers and software engineers cranking out catalogs, flows, and applications to streamline every aspect of IT. If it isn’t already the center of your IT universe, it probably will be in time.

However, one challenge that ServiceNow can’t solve alone is the speed of network infrastructure service delivery. If developers and operators wait days or weeks for requests to be fulfilled, that delay has a ripple effect on the rest of IT operations and on the business as a whole.

At Itential, we offer a wide range of products for integrating with ServiceNow, enabling teams to connect network orchestration directly to their ServiceNow environments. This brings network services into the same rapid, self-serve, ServiceNow-driven ecosystem as the rest of IT. Before we get into too many details, first a little experiment.

Log into any of the 3 major cloud service providers, create an account, and using their web interface dashboard/console, order up a feast of infrastructure — firewall, network, security groups, load balancing, IP addresses, anything it offers.

Now click submit and wait. How long? Depending on what you requested and what cloud platform, 10 minutes to maybe an hour, and you will have everything delivered to you, with directions on how to access it.

This is the cloud-like experience of infrastructure delivery. A couple of downsides — it’s not your infrastructure, and they will start billing you (so please delete everything, then go back and make sure you deleted everything again—IYKYK).

Now, the big question: What does it take to deliver your IT infrastructure efficiently through ServiceNow?

This is a question we get quite a bit, and it’s a discussion we are excited to have with customers and prospects alike. Why? Because we’ve made it super simple for your Network, Security, and Cloud infrastructure teams to work directly with your ServiceNow developers to enable this functionality — with no custom code required from either team, using the existing ServiceNow Flow Designer application that your developers are already using.

Your ServiceNow developers have created self-service catalogs that are available to your internal IT users, who can quickly and easily access these catalogs and select different IT services or resources from the list. Based on what they’ve selected, they are given a form to fill out and submit. Once the request is submitted, a ServiceNow Flow is executed that gathers the form data, and steps through a series of actions that models the IT process needed to fulfill the request.

These actions can do all sorts of useful things inside, and even outside, of the platform. Typically, when you take a close look at a Flow, you find actions to open, close, or update different request tickets, or wait for approvals before moving on. In essence, Flows are built to remove as much time consuming manual processes as possible in order to drive more efficiency.

However, many times in order to deliver infrastructure services to a user who has requested it in a self-service portal, the Flow will open a new request and a member of that specific infrastructure team must open the request and manually fulfill the request using the tools and processes for that team and that type of infrastructure. If the requested service requires resources from multiple infrastructure domains, then multiple requests are opened for each team, and each team is responsible for fulfilling their portion of the service.

This is where service delivery is very much un-cloud-like, taking days, weeks, or even months — because the more complex the request, the more teams are involved. Even if one team can accomplish their part of the order in a day, if another team takes 2 weeks to complete their portion, then the customer gets to wait the longest time of all of them. So there is a noticeable delay in delivering these services, and that’s not a ServiceNow problem. They’ve taken the process as far as they can, but they need a partner to connect infrastructure directly to ServiceNow to make service delivery more efficient. Here’s where Itential comes into the picture.

Wouldn’t it be great if your ServiceNow developers could just use Actions in a flow to directly request and receive the infrastructure resources that are required to fulfill a service request?

That’s precisely what we do with Itential Actions. ServiceNow developers can use Flow Designer and drag-and-drop Itential Actions to authenticate with our platform, execute workflows, and acknowledge the status of these jobs to know when all of the infrastructure resources are in place, so they can notify the customer everything they ordered is done. And that’s a very happy customer.

Itential integrates with all of your network, cloud, and security infrastructure so it can automate changes to deliver resources faster when a user requests them. Since every team has a different set of tools with different capabilities, we can leverage the automation tools they already have, or we can provide new automation capabilities if they need them. Then we enable every team to build low-code, visual workflows that can orchestrate the provisioning and deployment processes end-to-end. These workflows model the precise process that teams would manually execute, except it’s all automated, step by step, to include querying inventory and IPAM systems for resources needed to automate changes along with any other steps that may be required.

Not only do we make it simple for your teams to build these workflows, we also make it simple to publish these workflows so that they can be run from other platforms.

And that brings us back to ServiceNow Actions. With Itential, your infrastructure teams can collaborate directly with your ServiceNow developers and publish workflows that can be called immediately from an Itential Action. An Action that will seamlessly provision the infrastructure resources needed, and when all of these Actions are completed, the request is fulfilled — in minutes, not days or weeks.

If you’re ready to take action (pun intended), you might want to check out our recent webinar where we show you precisely how to accomplish this in your own organization – from example flows with ServiceNow, to orchestrated workflows that provision services with Itential.