ServiceNow Looking to Improve DevOps and ITOps with New Services

ServiceNow is growing its software portfolio with a series of new services designed to help advance digital transformation and improve operational efficiency for both DevOps and ITOps.

ServiceNow announced the services on May 11 as part of the company's Knowledge '22 conference being held in New York and the Netherlands. Among the new services is the App Engine Management Center (AEMC), which helps align low-code development with business goals and governance requirements. Also new is the Service Operations Workspace, a service that provides organizations with improved visibility and collaboration capabilities for ITOps issues.

"The No. 1 problem or challenge that organizations are facing is not that people aren't innovating, it's that they're trying to innovate now at scale," Marcus Torres, general manager and vice president of App Engine at ServiceNow, told ITPro Today.

ServiceNow Aims to Democratize DevOps

The new App Engine Management Center integrates with App Engine Studio, ServiceNow's low-code development environment, according to Torres.

AEMC provides some of the higher order capabilities that are needed for setting up DevOps beyond just building a low-code application. AEMC handles multiple tasks, including connecting to a source control repository, providing visibility into development pipelines, and helping to enable automated testing, Torres said.

Related:The Evolution of Low-Code/No-Code Development

The first release of App Engine Management Center focuses on making it easier for organizations to bring low code into DevOps workflows, he said. However, in the coming months there will be updates that add application usage insights, he added. The insights will provide metrics on usage statistics around applications.

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Service Operations Workspace Breaks Down ITOps Silos

ServiceNow has long been known for its IT service management capabilities, helping organizations manage the workflow of IT operations.

The new Service Operations Workspace extends the capabilities that ServiceNow provides with improved collaboration and visibility into the state of IT operations across an organization.

With Service Operations Workspace, IT staff will get a more integrated interface that surfaces information across different IT domains, Jeff Hausman, senior vice president and general manager of Operations Management Portfolio at ServiceNow, told ITPro Today. Previously, a workspace would show information pertinent for a given IT persona, such service desk, or security, he said. With Service Operations Workspace, IT users will now get more information surfaced to them more effectively, and they will be able to better collaborate with other IT staff.

Related:Hybrid Cloud, AIOps, and Beyond: 5 Trends That Are Reshaping ITOps

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"Beyond just the basics of sharing information, we're also applying a lot of capabilities around AI and machine learning to facilitate better outcomes," Hausman said.

Those better outcomes include more rapid detection of root cause for issues as well as predictive analysis on the IT operations side.

While ServiceNow was once primarily a trouble ticket-based IT management system, the company and its platform are much more now, Hausman said.

"We can correlate and analyze all kinds of machine-generated data going on in an environment — whether that's a cloud or a more traditional infrastructure environment — know what's happening, be able to surface those issues or anomalies, and ideally provide predictive behaviors for faster remediation," he said.