© 2016 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.1

Cisco ACI and ServiceNow: Build a Service-Aware Enterprise Stack for Agile IT Operations Management

© 2016 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Cisco ACI and ServiceNow: Build a Service-Aware Enterprise Stack for Agile IT Operations ManagementSolution Overview

© 2016 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.2

The ChallengeCloud computing offers organizations the opportunity to increase competitiveness and improve agility. This is why organizations in all industry-specific market segments are turning to cloud solutions to accelerate innovation, expand market reach, and reduce IT costs. However, embracing the cloud presents challenges. End users often demand that IT departments quickly and flexibly offer services that can help them get their jobs done. This goal leaves many IT teams struggling to maintain the business services needed to help ensure that end users remain productive. Some of the challenges they face in helping ensure the uptime of critical business services include:

• A manual service mapping process that can take weeks or months, depending on service complexity

• Lack of correlation between infrastructure changes and the business services they support

• Disconnected infrastructure tools and portals for change management and troubleshooting

• Inefficient root-cause analysis for service outages as a result of inaccurate service maps

The Solution Cisco® Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI™) provides an application-level policy model that abstracts the infrastructure details all the way up to business service requirements, so that the underlying infrastructure can be automatically configured based on service requirements. ServiceNow offers applications for IT service management (ITSM), IT business management (ITBM), and IT operations management (ITOM). Cisco ACI and ServiceNow have worked together to create a fully automated policy-based solution (Figure 1) that provides an advanced service-aware enterprise operations management platform. Using the solution, IT organizations can achieve accurate service mapping and extremely fast service provisioning with automated coordination between the infrastructure and the business service that it supports. Benefits include:

• Improved service quality

• Simplified change management

• Increased IT efficiency

Figure 1. ServiceNow and Cisco ACI Integration

Cisco Leaf

Spine

APIC APIC APIC APIC

Cisco ACIApplication

CMDBMIDServer

Response

IP Fabric with Integrated Overlay

Cisco ACI and ServiceNow: Build a Service-Aware Enterprise Stack for Agile IT Operations ManagementSolution Overview

© 2016 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.3

Cisco ACI and ServiceNow: Build a Service-Aware Enterprise Stack for Agile IT Operations ManagementSolution Overview

How It WorksServiceNow integrates with Cisco ACI open policy interfaces to provide a simple view of IT infrastructure and the way it relates to business services, with complete isolation of application tiers and data within shared infrastructure. With this integration, organizations can use the Cisco ACI application in their ServiceNow instance to run discovery processes through the Cisco ACI management, instrumentation, and discovery (MID) server. The MID server has access to the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) and Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches fabric. It also has the capability to automatically update the ServiceNow configuration management database (CMDB) with discovered inventory data consisting of physical data (node links, chassis information, etc.) and logical data (tenants, endpoint groups [EPGs], contracts, policies, etc.) (Figure 2).

As a result, ServiceNow provides an optimal service model and service dependency mapping view with a unified operating model, enabling Cisco ACI to make real-time adjustments to connectivity and network resource allocation. When new services are deployed, this combined solution results in optimal dynamic resource allocation for business services with a service-level agreement (SLA) guarantee. Together, Cisco ACI and ServiceNow provide IT organizations with an outstanding solution for achieving a scalable service-aware IT operations management environment.

Figure 2. Discovery and CMDB Updates Using Cisco ACI Application

BenefitsThe ServiceNow and Cisco ACI solution offers these benefits:

• Automation: With the ServiceNow and Cisco ACI solution, IT organizations can drastically reduce the time required to map new services and detect changes for existing ones. Cisco ACI enriches the ServiceNow CMDB with physical inventory as well as configuration tracking, configuration drift analysis, and configuration rollback and roll forward. The solution not only enables fast and accurate service mapping process, but also enables you to reclaim or retire applications, servers, and storage and networking resources when they are no longer needed, resulting in operational agility and efficient use of resources.

• Visibility: Cisco ACI enables ServiceNow to provide real-time visibility across scale-out cloud, virtual, and physical infrastructure. When service and infrastructure changes occur, including actions related to change requests, infrastructure events, and service outages, IT teams can quickly identify the root cause and determine the best way to remediate the issue, leading to drastically reduced mean time to recovery (MTTR).

• Dynamic service maps: Cisco ACI tracks IT infrastructure and notifies ServiceNow about the correlated business services across scale-out IT infrastructure. IT teams can then use ServiceNow to create an accurate service-aware view and easily keep it up-to-date with full automation and compliance. By correlating infrastructure with existing services, ServiceNow with Cisco ACI discovers and models components that are part of a business service. This unique approach eliminates irrelevant data points and creates accurate service maps in minutes.

• Operational efficiency: IT operations teams respond more quickly and become more proactive with Cisco ACI keeping an up-to-date view of service-aware infrastructure and informing ServiceNow about the services that are available and the ways that they are connected.

• Realistic SLA: Improved automation, visibility, and compliance, coupled with dynamic and accurate service mapping, enable IT organizations to create realistic SLAs that can be met and to easily share them with stakeholders across the organization.

Next Steps• If you are interested in a joint Cisco ACI and ServiceNow solution,

please contact a representative:

- Deaddin Edris at ServiceNow: deaddin.edris@servicenow.com

- Adam Ozkan at Cisco: adaozkan@cisco.com

• For more information about ServiceNow, visit http://www.servicenow.com.

• For more information about Cisco ACI, visit http://www.cisco.com/go/aci.

© 2016 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco and the Cisco logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Cisco and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and other countries. To view a list of Cisco trademarks, go to this URL: www.cisco.com/go/trademarks. Third-party trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. The use of the word partner does not imply a partnership relationship between Cisco and any other company. (1110R) C22-737394-00 08/16

Cisco ACI and ServiceNow: Build a Service-Aware Enterprise Stack for Agile IT Operations ManagementSolution Overview