Cisco Data Center Networking App for ServiceNow Solution Overview
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Simplify operations by managing your Cisco Data Center network with ServiceNow
Our Cisco Data Center Networking App for ServiceNow gives you the ability to track your data center inventory, helps you visualize the relationships between the components of your fabrics, simplifies and automates your troubleshooting and ticketing processes, and enables you to automate directly from ServiceNow and create self-service experiences for your employees and customers.
The Cisco® Data Center (DC) Networking App for ServiceNow is the solution to the challenges that come with “data sprawl.” It takes ServiceNow and the powerful set of Cisco data center solutions and combines them in a way to create great value for customers.
With the DC Networking App, customers can enhance ServiceNow Configuration Management Database (CMDB) data with Cisco data center product-specific information and visualize the relationships between the physical and logical components of fabrics. They can also enrich ServiceNow incidents with detailed telemetry data collected by Cisco Nexus® switches and Cisco’s data center controllers. In addition, the DC Networking App can reduce the time needed to analyze and remedy issues, and create more automated, self-service requests and experiences for employees and customers.
Key benefits of the Cisco Data Center Networking App for ServiceNow
● Inventory management and service cataloging
● Workflow automation
● Firmware upgrades and storage of configuration archives on the ServiceNow platform
● Comprehensive network visibility and automated, closed-loop incident management
● Ticket creation on the ServiceNow platform, based on alarms and data imported from Cisco data center controllers
With so many systems, tools, and data, organizations constantly seek ways to optimize and simplify
Businesses constantly seek ways to drive growth, reduce costs, and manage risk. However, many companies today face the challenge of “digital sprawl.” They have tons of data sitting across droves of systems and vendors, making it difficult to connect, orchestrate, and structure that data to create efficient processes and outcomes.
Cloud-based service management solutions, such as ServiceNow, offer critical insights and control. ServiceNow is not a system of record, but rather a platform that sits atop organizations’ existing data and systems, preventing the need to replace those existing systems. ServiceNow’s platform empowers employees and customers to purposefully orchestrate and automate tasks and processes across their enterprises, helping them to become more efficient and optimized. It helps them monitor service health, identify service disruptions, aid with root causing and resolution, and track dependencies and relationships between IT services.
However, customers using these solutions still don’t have full visibility of the underlying network or all of the variables that can cause service disruptions. When complex network problems arise, ServiceNow’s solutions need deeper insights into the intent of the network administrator to pinpoint, characterize, or resolve them—it can be an arduous investigation and troubleshooting process. Additionally, even with ServiceNow’s powerful centralized management data base and workflow automation tools at their disposal, customers still lack the product-specific information that enables them to maximize the value ServiceNow can provide when it comes to seamlessly managing their networks.
Simply put, our joint customers need solutions that can import information specific to Cisco products into ServiceNow’s Configuration Management Database (CMDB). They need ways to enhance ServiceNow incident management with the rich telemetry information that Cisco products collect. Finally, they need integration between Cisco products and ServiceNow that can give them more value than either tool standing on its own; integration that can help them troubleshoot more easily, reduce mean-time-to-resolution, and deliver IT services more efficiently.
Where to download
The Cisco Data Center Networking App for ServiceNow is available for purchase and download via the ServiceNow store. Once downloaded, customers can access and use it directly from their ServiceNow platform instances.
Cisco data center integrations available for download from the ServiceNow store
Solution components
The DC Networking App for ServiceNow uses a Management, Instrumentation, and Discovery (MID) MID server to fetch the physical application topology and logical constructs from the Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC), Cisco Nexus Dashboard Fabric Controller (NDFC), Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches, and Cisco Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator (NDO) through those controllers’ and products’ REST APIs.
Cisco DC Networking App for ServiceNow architecture
Core solution benefits
The DC Networking App for ServiceNow then enables users to manage their Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches and NDFC/Cisco ACI® controller inventory, create automated workflows for ACI, do self-service cataloging, manage incidents, upgrade firmware, and store configuration archives. Additionally, the application creates service-aware business mappings based on data in the CMDB tables, enabling customers to visualize their network topologies and dependencies and perform configuration-drift analysis. Users can create their own custom naming conventions and can create custom relationships between their Cisco data center inventory and other data in their wider ServiceNow CDMB.
Core use cases and benefits of the Cisco DC Networking App for ServiceNow
Fundamentally, because the DC Networking App uses our products’ APIs—in contrast to the general ServiceNow discovery process, which is based on Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)—the App can import much more Cisco product-specific information into the ServiceNow CMDB.
Table 1. Use case details
| Core Integration Use cases |
New Cisco DC Networking App feature, relative to existing integrations |
| Import Cisco data center product-specific data into ServiceNow CMDB |
● Inventory management for NDFC-discovered LAN switches, as well as for Cisco Nexus 9000 “standalone” switches
● Define custom relationships between DC Networking App tables and broader data collected by ServiceNow
● Customizable naming conventions for data imported into ServiceNow CMDB, as well as configurable inventory scheduling
● Support for inventorying using Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator
● Switches, controllers, and endpoint tables inventoried via ServiceNow’s Identification and Reconciliation Engine (IRE) – eliminates the creation of duplicate entries
|
| Centralize Dashboards |
● NDFC alarms imported into ServiceNow CMDB
● Creation of dashboards for NDFC, Nexus 9000 “standalone” switches, and Nexus Dashboard Orchestrator fabrics, in addition to current dashboards for ACI fabrics
|
| Automated Ticketing |
● Automated ServiceNow incident creation from NDFC-imported alarms
● Health and fault enhancements – customizable logic that creates tickets with detailed troubleshooting tips and tracking
|
| Service Catalog and Orchestration |
● Support for orchestration using ServiceNow Flow Designer (current apps and integrations support older ServiceNow Workflow Editor)
|
| General Integration Performance |
● MID-server cluster support – assign APIC sites to a MID-server cluster for better resiliency and load balancing
|
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