Tired of Being Stuck in Tickets? Integrate ServiceNow with Itential to Get Back to Network Tasks

If you mention the words “change request” or “ServiceNow” to the network team, what kind of reaction would you anticipate? Would they instantly recoil due to the repeated trauma of staring, clicking, filling out, updating, rinsing and repeating? Or would they maybe lash out in frustration just thinking about the fact that they spend as much, or maybe even more time, managing and updating a seemingly endless stream of requests when they would much rather be engaged in something for the network. You know, doing something actually fun and useful.

While this reaction may seem extreme, change request systems like ServiceNow have become incredibly time consuming and overwhelming for the network team. They’re stuck in ticket management instead of spending time on their day jobs making actual changes to the network. However, these systems are a necessary and unchanging part of the IT ecosystem.

Why Network Teams Need Change Management Systems

Regardless of how they feel about change management systems, there are a variety of important reasons that network teams need them. Documenting changes to the network is important, no matter how hard we may not want to actually do it. It may sound cliché, but you realize the value of documenting changes when something goes terribly wrong on the network.

When something does go wrong, the first two questions enter your mind – “What happened?” and “Who did it?.” To unpack those panicked thoughts just a bit more, what we really want to understand is the nature of the problem and what, if any, changes were made to the network devices that could have caused the problem or outage. This is a critical piece of information that can make the difference between resolving the outage in minutes or troubleshooting and searching for a previous configuration backup that can take hours before resolution.

This data you need to resolve an outage in minutes doesn’t appear in ServiceNow by magic, it must be updated in a ticket, usually by a person, and that person is unfortunately you. While that may be a tedious and unwanted process, that data is always there when you need it as an insurance policy and contingency plan. Accountability is important as well — knowing who made the change, but also having the oversight by others before a change is made helps to ensure less errors are made, which means less outages. All of this documentation may also be necessary to adhere to audit and compliance rules.

Why Network Teams Feel Stuck in Ticket Management

The truth is that ITSMs like ServiceNow don’t exist to make network teams miserable, they serve an important and useful function (especially when you need them to fix something at 2 am). So why do we tend to get such a visceral reaction from the network team?

Well, there are many, but time always is top of the list. Network engineers suffer from a profound lack of time to do more network things — troubleshooting, optimizing, building, architecting, researching — and are instead stuck spending their valuable time in ServiceNow. In addition, while in the process of doing those network things, stopping that flow to update tickets really, really disrupts their process. No one likes playing browser tab table tennis, ping ponging between ServiceNow, network dashboards, and maybe even an IPAM or source of truth. And while I would put a network engineer’s copy and paste skills against anyone else in IT, there IS a better way to operate with ServiceNow and restore some time (and focus) back to the network team.

How Itential Can Help You Get Out of Ticket Management & Back into the Network

Itential can help you get out of ticket management by building network automations that can integrate directly with ServiceNow and any other IT system you may need. It’s important to start simple, first integrating the Itential Automation Platform with your ServiceNow instance. This can be done in one of two ways — you can download an adapter directly from our Pre-Built Library or you can generate an integration directly from API documentation that is available from the vendor. The process of building your own codeless integrations gives our customers the power to integrate whatever they have, whenever they want.

Once ServiceNow is onboarded, the API functions that were defined in the documentation become available as tasks to be used in an automation workflow. So starting simple means you can take a single ServiceNow task to ‘Create a Change Request Ticket’ and drag it into the canvas, fill out the necessary fields, and your network automation has now saved you the step of manually opening a ticket. As your network automation gathers network information, makes a change, or verifies that everything is working, you can then integrate another ServiceNow task into the workflow, “Update a Change Request Ticket.” With this task, you can update the ticket in multiple ways, like updating the work notes with the output of a show command before a change is made, then updating the notes with the actual CLI change command, and after that’s completed updating the ServiceNow notes with the show command output for verification that the change was made successfully. Finally, the same task to ‘Update a Change Request Ticket’ is also used to close a ticket out when the work has been completed. It may look something like this:

At Itential, we know how important it is for your network team to spend their time doing network tasks instead of updating tickets. Network automation can help save network teams a lot of time automating a task, but there’s still a LOT of time spent around the manual process of updating ServiceNow tickets. For many networking teams, just automating network changes is a big enough challenge, so the thought of integrating ServiceNow may seem like a stretch —but it isn’t.

To see just how easy it can be, you can watch my recent demo where I show exactly how to integrate ServiceNow into the Itential Automation Platform as well as how to implement the foundation tasks to open, update, and close a ticket. Find out how to restore more time to your day, so you can get out of those pesky tickets and back to the network.