ITOM-ITSM Integration – The Key to Smarter Service Management

Your IT service management (ITSM) tool enables your IT service delivery and support, helping your organization manage incidents and create a seamless end-user experience. However, in today’s dynamic IT environment, even the best ITSM solutions might have limitations in addressing certain ITSM challenges. The challenges include manual configuration management database (CMDB) updates, reactive incident management and long resolution times, and monitoring-alert fatigue. This article looks at these challenges (and their impact) before offering a solution – ITOM-ITSM integration.

The cost of manual CMDB updates

Keeping a CMDB up-to-date is essential across healthcare, government, banking, and other industries. However, for the banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) sector, maintenance of the corporate CMDB is very important because it must adhere to certain compliance regulations that require up-to-date IT asset details.

A recent case of a well-known Southeast Asia bank shows this. The bank acquired and installed new servers and switches, but due to manual oversight, these assets were never updated in their CMDB. During an ISO/IEC 27001 audit, where a key requirement is having an up-to-date CMDB, they were found non-compliant and received a $10,000 fine. If the bank had realized the risks of manual maintenance sooner and invested in automated CMDB management, it could have saved $10,000. With today’s available IT operations management (ITOM) technologies, CMDB updates should never be a manual task but an automated process.

The risks of reactive incident management

Reactive troubleshooting, when technicians only respond after end-users report issues, is no longer efficient (and both technicians and customers suffer). End-users are left waiting, frustrated, while technicians scramble to fix issues that could have been prevented in the first place.

For example, if a bank’s online banking platform starts slowing down, making transactions super slow, but the IT team doesn’t notice the issue until frustrated customers start complaining. The technicians start troubleshooting and find the root cause as excessive memory usage on the application server because the server struggled to handle concurrent sessions from many users. Since the issue was addressed reactively instead of proactively, the bank’s customers have to wait for a resolution, leading to them questioning its reliability. With an ITOM proactive monitoring solution, the bank could have spotted the issue early, resolved it before customers noticed, and safeguarded its reliability.

Long resolution times due to lack of visibility

Without proper asset relationship mapping, troubleshooting becomes difficult for technicians. If an issue cascades from an application to the network, multiple teams get involved. Without clear insights, it often turns into a blame game – dragging out resolution times and increasing the Mean Time To Recover (MTTR).

Let’s say, for example, an e-commerce website crashes in the middle of a big sale, preventing customers from making purchases. With no clear asset relationship map, IT technicians start to troubleshoot the issue. They check the web server first, and it seems fine. Then, they suspect it might be a network issue, but with no visibility into asset connections, troubleshooting took time and increased the MTTR. After many hours of troubleshooting, they finally discover that a misconfigured switch was blocking traffic to the web server. But, by then, the damage was done:

• The frustrated customers took their business to your competitor
• There’s revenue loss from missed sales opportunities
• There’s reputation damage as trust in your company took a hit.

With proper asset relationship mapping (as delivered by an ITOM tool), all this chaos could have been avoided. In today’s ITSM landscape, this capability isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s a necessity.

The issue of alert fatigue (without ITOM)

One of the biggest headaches for IT technicians is dealing with a flood of alerts, especially when most are unnecessary. Sorting through such alerts to find the real critical alerts wastes valuable time and can lead to major oversights.

For example, an IT team schedules routine maintenance, expecting some servers and network devices to go offline temporarily. But as soon as the maintenance window begins, their dashboards are flooded with “device down” alerts. In the chaos, a real issue – a separate, unexpected server failure – goes unnoticed.

With an intelligent ITOM monitoring system that stops such unnecessary alerts during planned downtime, it would have been easy for them to focus on any critical alerts – preventing unnecessary distractions and ensuring a swift response.

The solution – giving ITSM the boost it needs with ITOM

The key to solving these challenges? Integrating ITOM with your ITSM. Why ITOM? Because it helps ensure an up-to-date CMDB, enables proactive incident management, provides holistic infrastructure visibility, and reduces alert noise. Thus addressing the many challenges that IT teams face.

But how do you choose the right ITOM tool? Here are some “must-haves” to consider:

• IT infrastructure mapping – does it provide a holistic IT infrastructure map covering from the application layer to the network layer in a single view?
• Real-time monitoring – does it track asset health, availability, and performance in real-time?
• Scheduled asset discovery – does it scan and sync assets with the CMDB at regular intervals?
• Automated workflows – can it automatically troubleshoot Level 1 tickets without manual intervention?
• Compliance support – does it help ensure compliance with standards like HIPAA, GDPR, and PCI DSS?
• Noise reduction – does it offer downtime scheduling, alert correlation, and uplink dependency to filter out noise and highlight only critical alerts?
• Seamless integrations – does it support multiple ITSM tool integrations out-of-the-box and support REST API-based custom ITSM integrations?

We believe integrating ITOM with ITSM is a necessity. An ITOM tool like ManageEngine OpManager Plus, seamlessly integrated with your ITSM tool (whether ManageEngine ServiceDesk Plus or another), helps your organization eliminate blind spots, automate CMDB updates, proactively resolve issues before they impact end-users, and cut down on alert noise.