DX Spectrum vs. ServiceNow IT Operations Management

As I said before, not only for Spectrum, but for any monitoring tool, you need to know what is critical in your environment and think about how exactly you should monitor and treat it. If you have done that, everything will work just fine.

• Well Suited - Networking Monitoring
• Less Appropriate - When you need to customize some monitoring and to update the version

Incentivized

We have taken advantage of the single platform for different IT disciplines over the past few years and now we are doing more and more with the integrations. Our teams are looking at the same information which stops the blame game a lot. Their newest AIOps has been a very nice surprise as we've tried another tool for about 2 years and it required us to hire outside consultants to try and build what we needed. So far, ServiceNow found a lot of things we didn't know to look for. It's not perfect in fixing everything, but really has provided a lot of visibility and troubleshooting.

• Polling and traps can be configured to take heartbeats at specified intervals and notify on an event in real-time, respectively.
• Topology of devices gives a high-level overview of network architecture.
• Discovery of devices is simple and secure with the use of community strings.
• Details can be added per device or alarm type for actions to be taken to make troubleshooting easier.

Incentivized

• The centralized dashboard allows us to keep track of production incidents as they come in, and allow us to view and sort them based on severity, making sure it's tracked
• The read/edit access and role granting process is straightforward, meaning that only the right people can change /update the statuses of incidents without unintended consequences
• With AI driven classification, it's easy to track outage impacts

Incentivized

• NOC
• Data Center/Telecom

Incentivized

• Scan network is limited to their discovery tool, which is costly
• Integration to jamf and ubunto tools
• Agents TCO
• integration to password management tools which are critical for successful scans

Incentivized

Other tools I have used are more server/application-centric. CA Spectrum seems to work effectively and efficiently for network devices. Notification delays can be set to grant grace periods in case of network blips or false positives, which occur ALL the time. Other monitoring tools send event notifications immediately and would clear instantly, which while on-call can wake a technician for no reason.

Incentivized

BMC was our legacy system before deploying ServiceNow. It's time had passed for us as it couldn't really keep up with our move to cloud and the number of services we were using. The cost kept getting higher, especially with all of the customization we had to do. Over the years, just got unwieldy. We still use Splunk for raw data and log analysis, but we upgraded to ServiceNow event management and the Loom system log analytics. We had Loom before ServiceNow bought them, but it's nice it's all on one platform for us. Splunk at times had so much info, we didn't know where to start, but ServiceNow gives us a great starting point.

• Proactive monitoring for networking
• To many times to plan an update

Incentivized

• With the regular use of ServiceNow IT Operations Management platform, our incident resolution time has gone down by over 90% over the past year
• Our access and role granting process has been streamlined leading to increased developer hours by around ~90 PM
• With the enablement of AIOps driven impact prediction, we expect an improvement of user communication time by over 90%

Incentivized