Agility, High Velocity IT and LKN’s Maturity Model (A Free Give Away)

High Velocity IT! We have been seeing a lot of hype and talks and less action on High Velocity IT in ITIL4. There are so many talks about Digital Transformations, Automation and Fast Phased Delivery but are we on track with out actions? Are we inline with the talks? Are we actually Automating? Are we actually moving fast? Are we agile?

We have heard so many talks about the High Velocity Implementations and the Digital Transformation, Let me explain how ServiceNow as a Trigger can automate the most routine activities in managing IT day in and day out.

Activities that can be automated inline with High Velocity IT

Patch Management

Patch Management has always been a routine activity resulting in errors and tedious routine tasks, however this is much needed the maintain the sanity of the IT Systems

List Of The Best Patch Management Tools

Check out the Top Patch Management Tools that are available in the market.

1. NinjaOne Patch Management (Formerly NinjaRMM)
2. Atera
3. SolarWinds Patch Manager
4. Syxsense
5. Microsoft SCCM
6. GFI LanGuard
7. ManageEngine Patch Manager Plus
8. Kaseya
9. SysAid
10. Itarian
11. Automox
12. PDQ Deploy
13. Pulseway

Enterprise Storage Management

Disk Management has been a sanity check routine activity to ensure the storage doesn’t cause a concern to the services, The amount of information being passed on, stored and reused is very huge at a enterprise level and the need to store and reuse the information is immense.

Here is our list of the best storage management and monitoring tools:

1. IntelliMagic Vision for SAN – FREE TRIAL: A monitoring system and capacity management tool for SAN servers. This is on-premises software that runs on top of a hypervisor.
2. SolarWinds Storage Resource Monitor – FREE TRIAL: Tracks the performance of storage disks and devices that come from a long list of providers. Installs on Windows Server.
3. Paessler PRTG – FREE TRIAL: A collection of system monitoring tools that includes a specialised monitor for SAN systems. Installs on Windows Server.
4. Nagios An infrastructure monitor that covers networks, servers, and applications and includes routines for tracking storage system performance.
5. SevOne A network monitoring system that includes procedures to monitor storage services. Runs on top of a hypervisor.
6. AppDynamics A cloud-based infrastructure monitoring platform that covers all types of servers, including those used for storage.
7. ManageEngine OpManager A monitoring system for networks and servers that includes special routines for supervising storage servers. Available for Windows Server and Linux.
8. PowerAdmin Storage Monitor A monitoring package that covers network equipment, servers, and storage devices. Runs on Windows.
9. EG Enterprise A cloud-based monitor for IT infrastructure that includes storage device monitoring.

Platform and Instance Management

All Cloud Platforms inclusive of SaaS, PaaS, Storage, Database, Virtual Servers and spaces and much more has an exhaustive list of controls embedded in to the Admin Console to Manage the Instances and has additional controls, however these aren’t automated rather needs a human intervention to make these changes as needed to the configurations. These controls also help us manage the Deployments of Patches across these platforms and enterprise cloud applications. Examples are: Oracle, VMWare, Azure, AWS, ServiceNow and much more

Server and Network Node Reboots

Servers and Network nodes needs to rebooted post patching or even during issues, these are still manually done in most of the circumstances even for today. All though network components have remote reboot and consoles to manage and maintain them it still needs human intervention as of today and no automation tools exists for these at the moment. Python scripts customised to specific environments are a solution for these and serves well for limited use cases at the moment and has to be implemented with additional care.

Change Enablement and Standard Changes – The Process

All though all the above changes are done separately any changes to them still needs a Change Request, CAB or an E-CAB Approval along with Human Intervention to take care of the activities. These are usually done in a tool similar to ServiceNow. Usually for Maintenance Activities a Routine and Recurring Standard Change is raised and kept as a placeholder which doesn’t need the CAB or E-CAB Approvals each time rather these routine activity is classified as a Standard Change and is managed as a low priority and low risk activity across enterprises.

While the Server and Network Node Reboots still needs the CAB and E-CAB Approvals and still a human intervention is seen across the enterprise IT management.

The Regulations and Compliance 

There are Multiple ISO Standards, Legal and Region based Regulations to Comply too and the Governance, Audit and the Manual Checks are a tedious routine task which involves a lot of coordination and collection of evidences. Currently there are multiple tools across organisations and there is no single source of truth available. These leads to huge man hours being spent on these activities along with delay or increased utilisation of man hours.

Proposed Solution inline with High Velocity IT:

ServiceNow – As The Trigger and Single Source of Truth

ServiceNow is emerging as One Tool for Various Use Cases, Industries and Domains along with facilitating interaction with external systems through integrations along with the IntegrationHub.

ServiceNow is the right tool to act as Single Source of Truth and can be integrated with almost all the tools mentioned above. Also ServiceNow can trigger specific activities in the external systems via the integrations with the use of embedded workflows. This makes it the right application to be the Single Source of Truth as all records can still be saved in ServiceNow along with the Updates, Statuses and Results for Audits and Governance Activities simplifying the Audit Purpose.

The Standard Change can be enabled as a Service Catalogue and made available to specific users to raise change requests for Routine Recurring Maintenance Activities, The Standard Change can trigger the change in the external systems via the workflow and the integration calling the respective API without any human intervention along with logging the results. ServiceNow also has the ability to call out exceptions or failed activities by automatically creating a Major Incident along with triggering notifications and opening the bridge on its own with the help of inbuilt WorkFlows.

Even the Event Monitoring Tool with in ServiceNow can trigger Major Incident Creation and Open a Bridge along with the Workflows enabling auto resolution in case of the Known Resolution such as Server or Node Reboots are embedded in the Workflow and an External Python Script is linked to it.

On the Whole ServiceNow can play the Role of Single Source of Truth by trigger the automations, collect the results, reporting exceptions via Incidents and also opening a Bridge for Major Incidents; also all these activities are logged along with timestamps which acts as a single source of truth; which intern simplifies the entire audit process.

All these at No Human Intervention can be achieved.

The Cherry on the Cake is the DevOps CI/CD – Currently GitHub is used in integration with ServiceNow to enable Continuous Development and Continuous Integration. Imagine DeepCoder stepping in as early as possible from MicroSoft, Even coding gets automated and the entire DevOps CI/CD will be completely automated.

These are Solely thought by Lokesh Kumar Narayana inline with the Maturity Model that I was designing for the Industrial Revolution V / IR V however I don’t have the funds or the resources needed to collaborate and take this forward.

These are inline with the Final Maturity that can be achieved in the New Model that I had put across. Again Remember its the Final Maturity so you can still take the baby steps, You as an Enterprise already have the other tools along with ServiceNow.

You just need a good implementation Partner and an Excellent understanding of the Systems you have in place.

All the best.

Free Give Away – LKN’s Maturity Model

I give up on taking this forward, I don’t have the funds or the backing to complete this, its very expensive and I can’t afford to make it happen all by alone.

The Model is solely created by LKN / Lokesh Kumar Narayana with the experience and the exposure I have got so far from the Professional Life, No Organisation or Any funding has been contributed to this model and LKN does have all the rights and does deserve the credit even if used in any form.