End-user IT Analytics Aids ServiceNow

See your IT infrastructure as never before!

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OverviewNexthink End-user IT Analytics for security, ITSM and transformation provides enterprise-wide, real-time analytics covering all endpoints, all users, all applications, all network connections with visibility into your IT infrastructure and service delivery. Nexthink helps IT departments connect, communicate and collaborate to achieve their major goals and to optimize endpoint security, operations, support, and workplace transformation projects.

The insight Nexthink customers receive on the delivery and consumption of IT applications and services compliments ITSM (IT Service Management) methodologies. Nexthink capabilities have been integrated with ServiceNow. This paper highlights the benefits Nexthink brings to ServiceNow.

Incident ManagementWhen resolving an incident, it is imperative that the workers have quick and easy access to relevant information regarding the impacted configuration item (CI). This information is leveraged in efficiently diagnosing and resolving the incident.

Nexthink maintains a real-time (in-memory) repository of information on a broad range of data associated with IT business end-users and associated endpoints. This data includes information regarding all applications and services running locally on the endpoint as well as applications that are delivered across the network and the associated network connections. A Nexthink collector is installed and runs on each of the endpoints in the organization. The collector sends data to a Nexthink engine in real-time to provide a centralized enterprise-wide, real-time view of the operational status and configuration of all applications and services as seen from the perspective of the IT business end-users and endpoints.

In most cases when an incident is created within ServiceNow, the incident is associated with an end-user and their endpoint device (CI). Through Nexthink’s integration with ServiceNow, real-time performance, security metrics and configuration status information from the CI are automatically gathered from the Nexthink engine.

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ServiceNow Console

The information is made available to the worker focusing on the incident directly in the ServiceNow console.. The metrics and status information for that CI is queried from the Nexthink real-time engine and placed within the ServiceNow database.

As seen in the screenshot (above) data regarding the health, compliance, and status of the endpoint is directly available to the incident worker. Two snapshots are taken and recorded in ServiceNow one at the time of the creation of the incident and the other from the previous week.  These snapshots can help the incident worker understand what has changed.. Nexthink’s real-time architecture ensures that the information is always accurate and up to date.

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The Nexthink provided view of local endpoint resource consumption, security configuration, as well as real-time analysis of the interaction, performance and bandwidth of applications and services on the network from the end-user’s perspective helps an incident worker diagnose and resolve issues faster. Nexthink Finder

From the ServiceNow console, there is also an option to “Open the Nexthink Finder” with the context of the end-user and endpoint (CI). This contextual drilldown allows the worker to have additional details immediately available to further investigate and work on the incident.

Suppose an incident worker is responding to an end-user reporting that their machine is running slow and experiencing a “blue screen of death”. Nexthink provides a highlight reel of all the activity experienced by the end-user and endpoint. As seen in the screenshot (above) the incident worker and immediately validate what the user is experiencing. Furthermore Nexthink can help the incident worker diagnose details about the activity on the endpoint at the time of failure.

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Reducing the Flood of Incidents

Many times when a worker in looking into an incident, it is important to know if there are other endpoints that are experiencing the same issues right now. Because Nexthink provides enterprise-wide, real-time analytics, the worker can look for issues before, during and after the time the incident was reported across all the endpoints in the IT environment. Looking at the screenshot (below) we see an example where multiple end-users are having an issue with the SAP Services.

If the number of affected end-users grows the incident worker can immediately post a bulletin and assign the incident to level 2, which will speed resolution and reduce the number of reported incidents for this issue.

When an incident is marked resolved, Nexthink can automatically take another snapshot of the endpoint or status of the service (as seen above) and place that in the ServiceNow database to provide confirmation that the incident was actually resolved.

Problem ManagementMost ITSM organizations using ServiceNow have a problem management methodology in addition to incident management. Nexthink’s enterprise-wide, real-time IT analytics also provide valuable insight to aid in more effectively analyzing and resolving problems.

In many cases resolving problems require multiple levels of analysis and investigation.

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For example ServiceNow workers generally need to know how widespread a problem is – is it isolated to just a couple of endpoints or is it a broad issue? How long has the problem been impacting user productivity on various endpoints?

Determining Scope of Impact

To accomplish this analysis a problem worker will generally associate one or more impacted CIs with the problem. As was previously outlined with the failure of SAP Services (see screenshot above), Nexthink’s centralized enterprise-wide view provides the problem worker with the needed information to identify the scope and impact of a problem and the probable cause. Without Nexthink it would take countless hours to bring all of this inter-connected and inter-related analysis together across time and all endpoints in the IT infrastructure, which is why Nexthink’s customers say, with Nexthink you will see your IT infrastructure as never before!

Investigating Problems

From the ServiceNow console, the problem worker can launch the Nexthink Finder to aid in the problem investigation. The Nexthink Finder is optimized to facilitate interactive real-time data analysis and visualization from across the organization. For example, in the screenshot (below) the problem worker can quickly identify which systems are getting errors when connecting to a line of business application in a remote data center. From the Nexthink Finder the worker can readily see all the systems across the enterprise that are having issues making the connection.

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In another scenario the worker may have a concern that a particular application version or patch update is a probable cause for some performance issues and the worker wants to see all machines with that same patch that has been installed in the past 2 weeks.

In all cases the problem worker that is investigating the issue has much more detailed insight into the operational and configuration status of all end-users, all endpoints, all applications and all network connections, all the time, in real-time when using Nexthink. Nexthink real-time analytics provide visibility for ServiceNow workers and enables them to much more efficiently understand the scope of the impact as well as aid in probable cause of issues. From any point in the Nexthink console it is easy to see the list of all users or CIs that are associated with a given application, connection, or network service.

Sharing Knowledge

As the worker is doing an investigation in the Nexthink Finder, there is integration with the ServiceNow knowledgebase to help highlight information that may already be known about this issue. For example a worker focusing on a problem with a rundll32.exe application crash sees a context menu to lookup known information about this issue.

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As in the case of incidents, the problem management worker can also use Nexthink to verify that the problem has been properly resolved and an audit of the results that highlight that the problem can be replicated from Nexthink to the ServiceNow database.

IT Governance, Risk, and ComplianceToday’s information workers interact with a large and diverse set of applications and IT services. With Nexthink End-user IT Analytics, everyone in the service delivery organization can have a clear picture of how the services are actually being delivered and utilized from the perspective of the business users that rely on the services.

While ServiceNow provides a number of reports, the Nexthink metrics that are associated with the CIs are very useful in identifying and reporting trends and status. The report in the screenshot (below) is an example of a report in the ServiceNow console that leverages Nexthink metrics to categorize active incidents.

Nexthink Portal

In addition to providing additional metrics for ServiceNow reports, Nexthink also supplies a series of web reports and dashboards that provide additional visibility regarding governance, risk, and compliance.

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Meeting Service Level Objectives

The business applications and services that are provided to the end users are usually managed under some service level agreement (SLA). From the Nexthink analytic reports and dashboard, managers and workers have real-time access to see how service levels have been met over time. Historical trending data is available for many months.

Application Faults and Reliability Issues

Nexthink’s analytics make it easy to proactively spot trends in application reliability. Nexthink centrally gathers all of the data related to the application faults. With the analytics it is easy to see when there are anomalies in the quantity of faults. Network timeouts and slow connections and low network throughput that impact endpoint application usability are also tracked and trend lines can be seen over time. This data is especially useful to gauge overall impact to the business users.

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Security and Compliance

The root cause of many security issue is related to non-compliance to security standards and best practices. Nexthink reports highlight where there are known security issues. This includes visibility into items such as users running with excessive privileges or endpoints that do not have security endpoint protection software properly installed or configured.

Many organizations use ServiceNow to define Control Tests. Again, Nexthink reports provide feedback on compliance to these test objectives.

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Support for Workplace Transformation Projects

All organizations go through transformation projects such as desktop operating system migrations, expanding the use of VDI, or rolling out new versions of critical line of business applications.

As part of any of these transformation projects, Nexthink provides a real-time view on not only the deployment status of the transformation project, but also a view of how the services are being provided to the endpoints both before, during, and after the transformation project.

This report highlights assessment information to enable the organization to know what to expect during a transformation project.

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This visibility can be used to help ensure an orderly process and that rollout guidelines are being adhered to in a transformation project. Orderly rollouts that are monitored in real time also help ensure that ITSM teams have accurate real-time data associated with any impacts to the end users.

As you have seen Nexthink provides important elements to aid ServiceNow for incident management, problem management, and IT governance.  Nexthink End-user IT Analytics helps IT departments connect, communicate and collaborate to achieve their major goals and to optimize endpoint security, operations, support, and workplace transformation projects.

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