Leverage the Power of ServiceNow for Mainframe and IBM i: Finding the Root Cause of Service Issues

Read this eBook to explore the challenges and benefits of expanding your ServiceNow platform to include the mainframe and IBM i for Event Management, and how Precisely’s Ironstream™ software for ServiceNow can help!

Executive Summary

IT’s role in providing business services is more critical than ever. After all, these are the services that drive the customer experience, foster innovation, boost efficiency and create competitive advantage. Downtime must be avoided at all costs. Any issues that impair performance or threaten availability, therefore, must be identified, investigated and resolved in a timely manner.

But finding the root cause of an issue is far from simple, in part, because many different systems typically support each business service. A breakdown or glitch in any one of those systems can cause the entire service to go down. However, identifying exactly what is causing the problem, and how to fix it, can take hours or even days.

Platforms such as ServiceNow gather data from multiple monitoring systems and make it possible for IT to drill down to find out what is going on. ServiceNow Event Management applies artificial intelligence (AI) powered by machine learning to sift through thousands of alerts impacting up to dozens of systems to isolate the most likely reason for a slowdown. This capability cuts through the noise to help IT find the underlying cause of service issues far faster than could ever have been done manually. Its platform-agnostic nature makes it possible.

This works well for almost all IT systems. But there is one vital area that traditionally has been omitted. ServiceNow Event Management does not have native access to mainframe and IBM i systems – the systems that most large enterprises rely on for their mission-critical operations. Even enterprises that consider themselves cloud-based often find that their business services touch a mainframe or IBM i at some point along their journey. Without visibility into these systems, IT service views are incomplete or must be manually stitched together, putting root cause analysis on shaky ground.

Organizations can overcome this challenge with Precisely’s Ironstream™ software for ServiceNow Event Management. Ironstream™ software seamlessly integrates with ServiceNow to incorporate mainframe and IBM i systems into the platform. This enables IT to guarantee high availability, to become more responsive to the needs of the business, and to avoid service degradation or outages.