Dive into AIOps (3/3): AIOps in ITOM Event Management – Conclusion

In this series of articles, we analysed the recent challenges of IT Operations from the Event Management and monitoring point of view, and we presented ServiceNow products which are here to tackle those challenges. In the last part of our series, we summarise the presented ITOM products. We will compare them, where possible, and see when the organisation should employ which product to get the best result.

We defined terminologies:

• what AIOps is,
• what Observability is,
• what Distributed Tracing or OpenTelemetry is.

We also had a look at cases, tasks where products with AIOps support us:

• events + correlations
• root-cause analysis
• impact analysis
• anomaly detection
• predictions
• integrated workspaces
• remediations

Let’s put it all together now, to get a better understanding of the current situation.

We are looking at the diagram showing how the AIOps products of ServiceNow can be connected together. On the left, we have Metric Intelligence with ACC agents and Health Log Analytics; on the right side, we have Lightstep.

Metric Intelligence and Health Log Analytics take a large number of metrics, alerts and logs, and work in any environment, including the containerized one. These products and Lightstep can do root-cause analysis, but they depend on the quality of data and, of course, a reliable CMDB. 

They can work together aggregated with ServiceNow ITSM, CMDB or Technology Workflows, where we can bring in other elements like change, incident, and problem management for correlation. Especially bringing in the change data is important because a change can easily cause an outage.

If you look at it from an Observability point of view for modern applications, then, of course, Lightstep is a better tool. However, if you have a hybrid environment, then you may also need Metric Intelligence or Health Log Analytics AIOps products. These products here are based on metrics and log analytics, while Lightstep is based on distributed traces, and that is one of the best technologies for doing a root-cause analysis for modern applications.

We hope that our analysis gives a better understanding of the available Servicenow offerings for smart and automated Event Management and helps to find the way in this evolving ecosystem. 

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