Beyond service mapping plus: Discover a superior alternative
Table of Contents
- Service mapping and service mapping plus- what’s the difference
- Key features of ServiceNow service mapping plus
- Benefits of ServiceNow service mapping plus
- A cost-effective alternative: Virima makes your service mapping journey easier
- Why integrate Virima’s service mapping solutions into your processes?
- Choose the right service mapping solution for your needs
Understanding the full scope of an IT environment is critical for keeping systems running smoothly. Service mapping tools play a key role in visualizing the relationships between applications, and infrastructure, thus, helping organizations streamline operations. While Service mapping plus has been a popular choice for many, there are superior alternatives that can provide enhanced functionality and greater value.
If you’re looking to elevate your IT operations with a solution that goes beyond conventional mapping, it’s time to explore Virima. Virima redefines the service mapping experience with its intuitive design, near-real-time visualizations, and seamless integration capabilities. With ViVID™ (Virima Visual Impact Display), businesses gain detailed insights into IT interdependencies, driving operational efficiency and improving decision-making.
In this blog, we will explore why Virima stands out as the superior choice for ServiceNow service mapping plus. We’ll also discuss how Virima can transform your IT operations.
Service mapping and service mapping plus- what’s the difference
ServiceNow service mapping automates the discovery of IT services and their components. It offers features like near real-time monitoring, visual service maps, and dependency mapping. It also helps manage services and handle incidents effectively.
ServiceNow service mapping plus builds on these features with added benefits. It includes Automated service suggestions, which use machine learning to provide intelligent recommendations for creating application services and streamlining the service mapping process. The application service readiness dashboard offers health checks and validation for these mappings, ensuring their accuracy. ServiceNow service mapping plus offers several additional features that can significantly enhance your ITOM services. We’ll explore these features in more detail in the upcoming section.
Key features of ServiceNow service mapping plus
ServiceNow’s service mapping plus is designed to enhance IT operations management by offering a detailed view of service dependencies within an organization’s IT setup. The new version includes several significant upgrades like utility scripts and filters that make mapping more efficient and user-friendly.
Here are the key features of ServiceNow service mapping plus:
1. Automated service suggestions
One notable feature of ServiceNow service mapping plus is automated service suggestions. This tool uses machine learning to analyze network traffic and recommend potential service entry points. By automating service identification, IT admins can quickly and accurately create service maps, significantly cutting down on manual mapping time.
2. Application service readiness dashboard
The application service readiness dashboard is a valuable addition. It helps users determine if their system is ready for machine learning-based service mapping. This dashboard offers insights into the health of machine learning tasks and highlights any issues that could affect ServiceNow service mapping plus. Ensuring all requirements are met helps streamline the process and improves map reliability.
3. Utility scripts for CMDB-based mapping
A new feature of ServiceNow service mapping is utility scripts for CMDB-based mapping. Users can now create and run custom scripts during the mapping process. These scripts improve the accuracy and efficiency of CMDB-based mappings, ensuring that service maps reflect the latest and most relevant data.
4. Filters for avoiding redundant recomputation
Service mapping plus now includes filters for avoiding redundant recomputation. This feature prevents unnecessary recomputation of already-mapped services by applying filters to discovered and tag-based services. This also helps save time and resources, focusing mapping efforts on new or changed services and enhancing overall operational efficiency.
5. Near real-time updates and CMDB integration
Service mapping plus integrates smoothly with the Configuration Management Database (CMDB), providing near real-time updates to service maps. Further, this feature ensures that maps reflect any changes in the IT environment, helping organizations keep their service maps accurate and up-to-date. Near real-time updates are also crucial for adapting to changes and maintaining service continuity.
6. Enhanced multi-cloud visibility
As IT infrastructures grow more complex, especially in multi-cloud settings, service mapping plus enhances visibility across cloud platforms like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud. This capability also allows effective service management regardless of hosting location, crucial for IT governance and operational efficiency.
7. Improved application service management
The enhanced application service management features help track and manage application services more effectively. Further, users can create and manage service maps to identify issues such as bottlenecks or single points of failure before they affect service availability. This proactive approach also helps maintain high service quality and network performance.
Benefits of ServiceNow service mapping plus
Business IT involves a complex mix of infrastructure, software, hardware, and applications. These parts work together to support key processes and deliver value. Service mapping focuses on this IT service delivery rather than the underlying infrastructure. When done correctly, ServiceNow service mapping plus offers several benefits:
1. Service-aware operations
The main benefit of service mapping plus ServiceNow is that it gives businesses the insights needed to make quick decisions. In addition, organizations can immediately spot issues and prioritize them based on business impact. This approach also provides clarity on the services themselves, including costs, optimization opportunities, and how changes affect services.
2. Hybrid environments
When companies move to a multi-cloud support setup, they often need to keep some on-premises applications. This creates hybrid IT environments where cloud-based and local services must interact. ServiceNow service mapping plus helps by offering full visibility into both environments, allowing for effective governance.
3. Faster time to value
Service mapping plus lets businesses quickly understand how their IT systems work together to deliver services. As a result, this leads to faster time to value across the organization.
4. Improved security
With better insight into the IT infrastructure, companies can identify potential IT security risks. Service mapping plus ServiceNow flags high-risk services for immediate action. It also enhances ongoing monitoring, helping businesses respond to issues faster.
5. Multi-cloud strategy execution
Using multiple cloud providers can complicate IT infrastructure scaling and increase risks. Service mapping plus simplifies multi-cloud strategies, helping businesses stay on top of dynamic cloud environments.
6. Proactive IT service management
Without service mapping, organizations often wait for issues before identifying the root causes. ServiceNow service mapping plus provides detailed service maps, allowing IT teams to find problems like bottlenecks and single points of failure. Further, this proactive approach ensures that services are maintained before customers experience any issues.
A cost-effective alternative: Virima makes your service mapping journey easier
While ServiceNow is well-regarded for its service mapping capabilities, its high costs and complexity can make it less accessible for many businesses. When comparing service mapping solutions, Virima stands out as a compelling alternative. With its ViVID™ and seamless integration features, Virima provides a more efficient and cost-effective approach to service mapping.
ViVID™: Enhanced visualization and service mapping
Dynamic service maps
Users can view dynamic infrastructure relationships, such as Application Dependency Mapping (ADM) and network topology. Any updates to the CMDB, whether automated or manually added, are instantly reflected in the service maps, supporting prompt decision-making.
Up-to-date health monitoring
The platform offers nearly real-time status updates on the health of assets and services, ensuring IT teams have the latest data to make informed decisions and resolve issues promptly.
Integrated vulnerability management
Smooth NIST NVD integration
Virima effortlessly connects to the National Vulnerability Database (NVD), automatically scanning for known weaknesses. Further, this feature helps organizations prioritize fixes based on the importance of each asset, which, in turn, bolsters IT security.
Maximized ROI
No-code integrations
Virima offers no-code connections with widely used ITSM solutions such as ServiceNow and Jira. As a result, it helps organizations streamline processes while getting the most out of their existing IT systems.
Automated asset discovery
Virima’s automated asset discovery minimizes manual work and reduces errors, allowing IT teams to dedicate more time to high-level projects. Compared to ServiceNow’s approach to service mapping, Virima’s solution delivers a greater return on investment by optimizing resource use.
Why integrate Virima’s service mapping solutions into your processes?
When managing IT infrastructure, understanding application dependencies can be tough. Missed details could lead to service outages. Service mapping helps you avoid this by identifying stakeholders and highlighting risks when planning changes.
Key benefits of Virima service mapping:
- Reduce incident response times: Service mapping visualizes your IT infrastructure, helping you make better decisions with accurate data. It also reduces incident response times by improving asset and relationship management.
- Track root causes quickly: Virima service mapping specifies the areas of root cause analysis by automatically mapping dependencies and showing hardware and software relationships. Further, it tracks changes over time so you can monitor application evolution.
- Enhance customer support and resolve issues faster: ViVID™ provides clear visuals of services and their connections. This also improves communication between service teams, thus, leading to faster incident resolution and reduced costs for you and your customers.
- Integrate asset discovery, relationship mapping app, and CMDB: The service mapping solution automates IT asset discovery and maps relationships to your CMDB and external systems. Further, you can map servers, networks, and more, and identify vulnerabilities. It also integrates easily with tools like ServiceNow®, Cherwell, and Jira.
Choose the right service mapping solution for your needs
Before investing in a solution, organizations should identify which features matter most to them. This way, they can purchase a service mapping tool that fits their needs and budget. ServiceNow’s high cost is due to its comprehensive service management capabilities, customization, complexity, implementation, etc. However, many organizations don’t need all these features.
Alternative options like Virima- offer excellent support for IT asset and service management. Virima can automatically discover and map your critical IT resources and how they connect to applications, services, and users.
Further, ViVID™ helps you resolve customer issues faster and improve your service quality. It also helps support teams quickly find the root causes of incidents and fix them before customers are impacted. With ViVID™, you always have a clear view of services, dependencies, and relationships, making changes easier when needed.
Contact Virima today to learn more about our service mapping tool.
