Enabling modern IT service management actions for ServiceNow with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Adopting modern IT service management practices is an important part of a digital transformation strategy. Many businesses depend on ServiceNow to implement modern workflows, and with the Ansible Certified Content Collection for ServiceNow, they can help improve speed, efficiency and consistency. 

Enterprises must allow line of business and technical teams to access service workflows in ServiceNow, while maintaining the necessary levels of governance, accountability and auditability. Automation using Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform in conjunction with ServiceNow can help customers achieve the desired levels of agility and flexibility-along with sound governance practices. All of this helps to boost speed, efficiency and accountability, while improving stakeholder satisfaction.   

Customers use Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to automate across IT processes ranging from simple and repetitive tasks up to full end-to-end and cross-domain processes. Its broad ecosystem supports management of assets across multiple domains in your IT environment.  

Red Hat makes this easier through Ansible Content Collections, a modular approach to Ansible automation content that enables reuse for speed and ease. Certified Content Collections are provided by Red Hat and partners as a part of Ansible Automation Platform to automate using supported content. Today, there are more than 80 Certified Content Collections-and growing. 

New: Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection for ServiceNow 

The newest of these certified collections is the Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection for ServiceNow. There are three key ways this combined solution helps deliver value: 

• Augment speed and efficiency in completing service requests. 

• Employ “closed-loop” automation to help ensure a “single source of truth” by eliminating inconsistent manual updates of configuration information about each IT asset.

• Transform and modernize your IT service processes for increased agility while maintaining auditability and control.

Using these solutions together give you the best of both worlds - modern service management combined with flexible automation for required actions and a trusted source of information about IT assets.  

Use cases: deliver service chain productivity and value through automation

Let’s take a look at a few examples of how this works. Here are three use cases that demonstrate increased productivity, improved stakeholder satisfaction and better auditability:

• Automate change requests - Many types of infrastructure and configuration changes can be standardized into reusable automation workflows, called Ansible Playbooks. The assets in this Collection enable these workflows to also automate ServiceNow service requests, including reporting change results and information related to those changes.   Service representatives can kick off an Ansible Playbook to automatically resolve the request with less effort, fewer tasks and happier end-users.

• Automate Incident response - When an incident occurs, different teams may need to perform several remediation actions. Ansible Automation can help these teams streamline the required actions and apply them at scale, while the assets in this Content Collection allow them to automatically update incident tickets with the information required to provide a consistent audit trail. This maintains a consistent source of information about  affected devices, speeds resolution, and helps eliminate errors or missing steps. 

• Full-loopback automation - Whether it’s a change request, incident or problem ticket, any large IT organization may have several teams involved in its processing and execution. Some of these teams may have direct access to the ServiceNow platform, while others  may not have access to it or simply benefit from using tools already part of their existing portfolio, such as Ansible Automation Platform. The modules included in this content collection automate the opening, advancement and resolution of IT service management workflow items, as well as keeping relevant information flowing into a “single source of truth” about IT assets. This helps ensure that information on your infrastructure is always up to date,  accurate, useful and auditable with fewer gaps and less manual effort.  

How can your team get started? 

Attend this webinar to learn more and see the Collection in action. 

Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform customers can access the Collection in automation hub, which is included with your subscription. For technical details, refer to this post or the documentation included with the Collection. The upstream version is available in Galaxy.