Cisco Network Assurance Engine Integration with ServiceNowContinuous network verification and analysis with closed-loop incident management

Solution brief

ChallengeIn monitoring service health, identifying service disruptions, and aiding problem resolution, cloud-based service management solutions offer critical insights and control. But they don’t have full visibility of the underlying network or all of the variables that can cause service disruptions.

When complex network problems arise, service management solutions need deeper insights into the intent of the network administrator to pinpoint, characterize, or resolve them. This resolution requires arduous investigation and troubleshooting. When the problem is identified and understood, network administrators must create a ticket, resolve the problem, verify the fix, and close the ticket.

Cisco Network Assurance Engine Integration with ServiceNow | Solution brief

These tedious, manual steps can result in unnecessary downtime, hinder user productivity, and pull network administrators away from value-added projects. And if the same problem reappears, all of the steps must be repeated.

What’s needed is a continuous network assurance and analysis solution that can be coupled with cloud-based service management tools. One that can align service and network insights and enable automated, closed-loop incident management, all through a single dashboard.

2Cisco Network Assurance Engine Integration with ServiceNow | Solution brief

Cisco Network Assurance Engine with ServiceNowCisco® Network Assurance Engine, the industry’s first SDN-ready intent assurance suite, integrates with ServiceNow to provide comprehensive insight and orchestration spanning IT services as well as the underlying network.

With Cisco Network Assurance Engine integration, ServiceNow administrators can predict network outages and vulnerabilities before they affect service performance and accelerate changes while reducing risk. They can also orchestrate, automate, and validate network changes through the ServiceNow dashboard.

Use case: VisibilityCisco Network Assurance Engine and ServiceNow integration provides comprehensive and customizable visibility to SmartEvents raised by Cisco Network Assurance Engine by allowing you to categorize and filter problems pertaining to your areas of expertise such as security, policy analysis, tenant routing, and resource usage (Figure 1). These filtering capabilities enable you to quickly

understand and address impending network problems relevant to your areas of expertise.

You have complete visibility into:

• Events and incidents across the past 24 hours

• De-duplicated SmartEvents

• Incident association to SmartEvents

Figure 1. SmartEvents dashboard

Network visibility, ticketing automation, and closed-loop incident management• Correlate the effect of infrastructure moves, adds, and changes on services.

• Discover, analyze, and track network incidents, lifecycles, and trends.

• Automate the response to recurring incidents.

3Cisco Network Assurance Engine Integration with ServiceNow | Solution brief

Use case: Incident managementThe Cisco Network Assurance Engine with the ServiceNow application automates the incident management process for all SmartEvents that Network Assurance Engine raises. After each network analysis cycle, every SmartEvent Network Assurance Engine raises is analyzed and reported as a new ticket or added to an existing ticket, depending on whether it is a completely new SmartEvent or one that has been reported in the past.

Each ticket has all the information that you need to identify the root cause of the problem, thus minimizing the downtime. You can either choose to push the recommended fix of the Cisco Network Assurance Engine to the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (Cisco APIC) to auto-resolve the problem or add customized resolution for the incident raised in ServiceNow (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Cisco Network Assurance Engine ticket with all details

4Cisco Network Assurance Engine Integration with ServiceNow | Solution brief

Use case: Closed-loop incident resolutionWith automated alerts, ticketing, problem remediation, and validation, the combination of Cisco Network Assurance Engine and ServiceNow enables closed-loop incident management. In doing so, it effectively creates a self-healing network.

If Cisco Network Assurance Engine finds an error or conflict within the network, it sends an alert to ServiceNow detailing the problem, its root cause, and recommended resolution. ServiceNow then creates a ticket and offers the administrator an option to automatically fix the problem. If the administrator chooses the automated fix, Cisco Network Assurance Engine instructs ServiceNow how to fix the problem within the network fabric. ServiceNow pushes the resolution to APIC, Cisco Network Assurance Engine validates the resolution was successful, and ServiceNow closes the ticket.

You can fully automate all of these steps, dramatically reducing the time and cost of network administration, troubleshooting, ticket management, and problem resolution.

Use case: Change request managementWith incidents being created for errors or conflicts in the network, the integration allows you to resolve the errors automatically with few button clicks. The application also logs these changes by creating a change request that helps the administrators on ServiceNow monitor all the changes and, if there is a need to roll back, they know exactly the changes made.

After the incident is assigned to a user, the assignee can just create a change request without having to agree to the auto-resolution the application offers. This choice helps operations teams manage the configuration push window and during the window, they can still go back to the ticket and opt for auto-resolution, thus making use of the closed-loop incident management within the scope of IT Operations Management offered by ServiceNow (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Change request management

Use case: Push notificationsThe Cisco Network Assurance Engine for ServiceNow solution integrates with collaboration tools such as Cisco Webex® [[apparently Cisco Spark is changing to Cisco Webex (lower case e is correct) as of mid-April, so I am changing all references to Cisco Spark accordingly]] and Slack. When a new ticket is created, a notification is sent to the Slack channel or the Cisco Webex Meetings room based on your configuration with details such as Ticket No., Priority, Assigned To, URL, and Details of the incident.

This setup helps the assignees prioritize their resolution measures based on the priority. And with the push notifications, the integration helps them be more responsive toward pressing problems, helping ensure less downtime of critical services (Figure 4).

C22-740224-01 04/18

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Figure 4. Push notifications

SummaryCloud-based service management solutions provide exceptional insight and control of IT services. Integrating them with a network assurance solution can help validate infrastructure changes, improve troubleshooting, and resolve problems that occur within the underlying network.

The integration of Cisco Network Assurance Engine and ServiceNow provides visibility and orchestration spanning IT services as well as the network fabric. It not only delivers continuous network verification, but also improves change management, streamlines component configuration, and enables closed-loop incident response—significantly reducing the time and cost of network administration.

To learn more, please visit:

Cisco Network Assurance Engine

www.cisco.com/go/dcecosystem

www.servicenow.com.