The latest release of Itential’s ServiceNow App comes with game-changing enhancements designed to bridge the gap between IT, application, and network teams.
Typically, IT organizations spend a significant amount of effort keeping up with evolving requirements for applications and infrastructure, which often involves making network infrastructure changes. The manual coordination that’s required between application, network, and infrastructure changes creates a bottleneck that can slow teams down.
The latest release of Itential’s ServiceNow App is built to eliminate this lag. ServiceNow developers and Flow designers can leverage new Itential Actions and embed them in their ServiceNow Flows, enabling application teams to self-serve network and infrastructure services which are then fulfilled and received instantly.
Integration Is a Two-Way Street
As an API Orchestration platform, our open source Pre-Built ServiceNow integration is one of the most widely used among our customers. By enabling users to make calls to ServiceNow directly from an Itential orchestration workflow, we help mitigate the need for swivel-chairing to perform infrastructure change management tasks.
Last year we released our certified ServiceNow App – which exposes network automation capabilities to ServiceNow developers and IT end users. By bringing the ability to call Itential workflows within the ServiceNow environment, we eliminated the need for teams to wait for in-demand custom development work to deliver a self-service catalog of network services.
In this latest release, we’re going even further. Now, ServiceNow developers and Flow designers can embed Itential Actions directly into a ServiceNow Flow. Actions give ServiceNow teams access to a self-service catalog that enables IT processes to directly gather operational network data, request new network resources, and orchestrate changes across multiple network domains.
Within these Actions, data can be passed between ServiceNow and Itential using a standardized API interface. This facilitates collaboration and accelerates service delivery while enabling developers on both sides — network automation engineers and ServiceNow Flow designers — to make any updates and changes to the surrounding automation they need, using the tools and processes that are best for them.
How Itential’s Latest ServiceNow App Updates Drive Value
When a ServiceNow Flow designer uses an Itential Action in a Flow, they can leverage the network team’s published catalog of services directly within the automated IT process they’re building in ServiceNow, eliminating any manual steps that previously existed in the IT process.
This revolutionizes how network and infrastructure consumers like application teams can self-serve infrastructure change requests, accelerating development by enabling teams to get what they need from the networking team as quickly as possible. With no manual coordination required for self-serve consumption of infrastructure, organizations can deliver internal resources as efficiently as public cloud services.
Value for Network Leaders & Organizations
For many organizations, ServiceNow is the heart of IT — but bringing network and infrastructure change requests directly into ServiceNow usually takes up heavy custom development work. ServiceNow teams are nothing if not busy, and our app saves them time by eliminating the need for custom code and enhances the way ServiceNow and network infrastructure work together.
This is impactful as ServiceNow users no longer need to wait for a network or infrastructure request to be fulfilled to keep moving forward with a given project. In addition, organizations don’t have to worry about retraining or hiring new people dedicated to making these specific changes — current staff can make these changes self-serve with no special skills or networking expertise needed.
It’s all about ensuring all IT requests can be fulfilled and delivered in a cloud-like, instant manner, driving innovation by bridging the gap between IT applications and the network.
Value for ServiceNow Designers & Developers
The top benefit is the ability to interact with network infrastructure in real-time within their own platform and processes and to enable application teams to receive everything they request as quickly as possible.
Typically, when an end user requests a service, any network services associated with the request add wait time. Now, these steps can be handled directly within a ServiceNow Flow.
In addition to infrastructure requests, network operational data queries can also be done directly through ServiceNow, which means IT processes can qualify whether the network can handle a request before asking for additional variables and ServiceNow admins can easily generate reports on how network resources are being used.
On top of all of this, it’s important to underscore the fact that these capabilities are integrated with ServiceNow environments with no custom code required — one less item for ServiceNow developers to juggle, and no wait time between adopting Itential and delivering infrastructure automations via ServiceNow. All in all, ServiceNow developers can spend less time making manual requests of the network team, and more time designing Flows that serve business needs.
Value for Network Automation Engineers
Network teams can use Itential’s ServiceNow App and deep integration capabilities to expose network automations to ServiceNow developers in a much more efficient and dynamic way — while ensuring they maintain ultimate control.
The network team can now collaborate with ServiceNow developers on the data passed between standard APIs and accessed through a given Action. Outside of this standard interface, network automation engineers can build in required access control and validations, auditing and logging, and any other steps required to expose automations for self-service with confidence.
In addition, the level of integration the app provides enables deeper use of the Itential Automation Platform for processes where it’s the right tool for the job. In some cases, teams can significantly reduce time to complete processes that the organization previously used ServiceNow to orchestrate. Teams can leverage Itential’s instant integration with other IT systems and its ability to orchestrate change processes that include key validations and testing steps, and then deliver those processes to be exposed via ServiceNow Flows so teams can consume the services instantly.
Value for IT & Network Consumers
The Itential ServiceNow App enhances the self-serve experience for network and infrastructure requests by application teams and other end users. When an IT organization is able to deliver network and infrastructure services in the same way that other IT services are presented, it transforms the way infrastructure is consumed. The ability to make a network request and instantly receive it is a game changer for ServiceNow users.
The new release helps organizations transform the way network and infrastructure investments support development and innovation, bridging the gap between IT applications and the network to ensure IT services are delivered as efficiently as possible. With Itential and ServiceNow, organizations can turn their networks into drivers of innovation, maximizing the value of network and infrastructure investments.
Want to see how it works? Check out this demo for a detailed look at how Itential Actions can be used to accelerate IT service requests, or check out a full overview of what you can do with the Itential ServiceNow App here. You can also watch this webinar for a deep dive look at the latest features.
Rich Martin
Director of Technical Marketing ‐ Itential
Rich Martin is the Director of Technical Marketing at Itential. Previously, Rich has worked at several networking vendors as a both a Pre-Sales Systems Engineer and Systems Engineering Manager but started his career with a background in software development and Linux. He has a passion for automation in the networking domain, and at Itential he helps networking teams to get started quickly and move forward successfully on their network automation journey.
