The ServiceNow® ITOM Visibility application provides a unified, connected view of your entire IT network and the services that it supports. ITOM Visibility was enhanced and updated in the Vancouver release.

ITOM Visibility highlights for the Vancouver release

  • Access Automated Service Suggestions using the Service Mapping home page.
  • Add service segments to existing application services in a configurable workspace by using automatically generated suggestions.
  • View load balancer name suggestions in the automated Service Mapping experience.
  • Migrate to Azure change processing to take advantage of an effective platform to manage events on a larger scale.
  • Use the new and enhanced Discovery and Service Mapping Patterns for horizontal discovery by Discovery and top-down discovery by Service Mapping.

See IT Operations Management for more information.

Important: Discovery and Service Mapping Patterns is available in the ServiceNow Store. For details, see the "Activation information" section of these release notes.

Important information for upgrading ITOM Visibility to Vancouver

Microsoft Azure Alert configuration
After upgrading, configure the Microsoft Azure alert service to forward alert notifications to the Now Platform in a secure way. For more information, see Use a secure webhook to forward the Microsoft Azure alerts to the Now Platform.

New in the Vancouver release

Collect information about the life cycle changes in Microsoft Azure resources using Azure change processing
Effectively collect information about the changes in the life-cycle states for Azure components through the Azure change processing APIs. This method is more efficient than the legacy event-driven discovery.
Discovery and Service Mapping Patterns:
Update your discovery capabilities through the following new discovery and service mapping patterns:
Discover the resources in your Kubernetes clusters continuously
Starting in version 3.9.2, use Cloud Native Operations (CNO) for Visibility to discover the resources in your Kubernetes clusters continuously as an alternative to pattern-based discovery. CNO for Visibility promptly reports changes in the resources to the instance and updates the Configuration Management Database (CMDB).
Access all mapping functions easily from the new Service Mapping Workspace
Increase efficiency with the redesigned home page that offers access to all functions of Service Mapping:
  • View mapped application services, mapped servers, and unmapped servers.
  • View mapped application services by type, creation method, or criticality on one page.
  • Map a new application service or enhance an existing one by accessing Automated Service Suggestions. For more information, see Automated Service Suggestions.
Agent Client Collector for Visibility
Use Agent Client Collector for Visibility to support the following platforms:
  • macOS Ventura (13) on ARM64 (M1/M2).
  • Oracle Linux (OL) 9 and Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.
Agent Client Collector Framework

Note the following enhancements to the Agent Client Collector Framework application:

Use running process filters to reduce actions on the database
Filter OS processes to reduce the number of records created, updated, or deleted in the database.
Discovery tables access improvements
Added indexes to four Discovery tables to improve database performance: Discovery status [discovery_status], switch forwarding, [discovery_switch_fwd_table], running process [cmdb_running_process], and TCP connections [cmdb_tcp].
Access tables from the Read Replica database
Reduce the processing load without affecting functionality. During standard horizontal discovery, delete-strategy queries to the Related CI Type [sa_ci_to_pattern] and Horizontal Discovered Payloads Snapshot [sa_payload_snapshot] tables can be redirected to a read replica (secondary database pool) if one has been set up and enabled on the customer instance.
Firewall Admin Workspace dashboard
Security and risk teams can view tasks, change requests, progress, and manage the overall firewall inventory life cycle in this unified dashboard.
Certificate Generation through Cert-Manager Integration
Request a certificate through the Kubernetes platform cert-manager with the ServiceNow External Issuer (sn-external-issuer) and store it as a secret.
Discovery Admin Workspace- Content 360
Manage application fingerprint-based discovery and gain extensive visibility with data visualizations, and suggestions based on Machine Learning (ML).
  • Application Fingerprints- use Machine Learning to cluster your running process data from the Running Process table into unique process signatures. Then use the unique process signatures to create application Configuration Items and map them. The Discovery Admin Workspace- content 360 provides the Discovery administrator the ability to visualize the Ml-suggested process fingerprints and create application CIs with a single click.
  • ITOM Content Service- Opt-in to share the process fingerprints data and SNMP System OIDs using the Continuance Delivery System (CDS). Receive through the CDS a weekly update of new classifiers that you can activate to discover application Configuration Items. For more information, see ITOM Content Service.
  • Visualization of application CIs with dependency views- View discovered application CIs and the impact analysis using the unified node map.

UI changes

Next Experience UI
The Next Experience UI Framework is now supported for the following features:
  • Service Mapping
  • MID Server dashboard.
The new dark theme enables visual accessibility. For more information see: Working with dark theme.

Changed in this release

Scale Cloud Discovery for multiple accounts using Cloud Discovery Workspace
The Cloud Discovery Workspace provides a more efficient way for you to work with Cloud Discovery.
Enhance previously mapped application services using Automated Service Suggestions
Enrich an existing application service by adding CIs from an additional candidate generated by Automated Service Suggestions.
View load balancer name suggestions as an option to name your new application service. For more information, see Name suggestions for application service candidates.
Enhanced navigation in Kubernetes Explorer
The Kubernetes Explorer provides more visibility over the Kubernetes objects and shows overall top-down Kubernetes perspective starting from the top-level cluster to the container and within the container.
SBOM availability in Kubernetes Explorer
See and access information on Docker images in Kubernetes Explorer by downloading the Software Build of Materials (SBOM).
Enhanced Discovery and Service Mapping Patterns
Update your discovery capabilities through the following enhanced discovery and service mapping patterns:
Changes to the Pattern Designer Enhancements app
  • Quick discovery
  • Executing commands from patterns without running full discovery
  • Getting pattern logs
  • Restarting discovery, validating and invalidating commands on the MID Server
  • Listing and testing discovery credentials
  • Support for discovery using a command-line interface (CLI)

Deprecations

Creating schedules for discovering cloud resources using classic Cloud Discovery is planned for deprecation. Consider moving to Cloud Discovery Workspace.

Activation information

ITOM Visibility is available with activation of the Discovery (com.snc.discovery) plugin and the Service Mapping (com.snc.service-mapping) plugin, which require the ITOM Visibility subscription. For details, see Request Discovery and Request Service Mapping. For full ITOM Visibility functionality, install the latest ITOM Visibility out-of-band applications from the ServiceNow Store. For cumulative release note information for all released apps, see the ServiceNow Store version history release notes.

Related ServiceNow applications and features

ITOM Health
The ServiceNow® ITOM Health product includes the ServiceNow® Event Management and ServiceNow® Metric Intelligence applications, which help you track and maintain the health of services in your organization.

Event Management gathers alerts from infrastructure events that both third-party monitoring tools and the ServiceNow® internal agent capture. Event Management uses IT-related information that ServiceNow® Discovery gathers so it can map alerts to configuration items. Based on the collected information, Event Management then provides dashboards that show a consolidated view of all service-impact events.

The Agent Client Collector application enables you to do the following:
  • Monitor your service availability.
  • Examine the health and performance of your environment.
  • Ensure that your infrastructure and its applications are running properly.
Agent Client Collector collects events and metrics. It runs in either a Windows or Linux environment.
Cloud Discovery Workspace
Cloud Discovery Workspace offers a comprehensive solution to manage the cloud operations of your organization.
Cloud Provisioning and Governance: Terraform Connector
The ServiceNow® Terraform Connector app is available in the ServiceNow® Store. The app enables Cloud Provisioning and Governance to provide a provisioning path into multiple cloud platform resources. Create service catalog offerings for Amazon Web Services (AWS) Microsoft Azure, and VMware vSphere by importing the Terraform templates.
The Terraform Connector app also supports the following:
  • Schedule discovery of configuration management providers and configuration installers for Terraform Open Source, Terraform Enterprise, and Terraform Cloud.
  • Store the Terraform templates in public and private GitHub, GitLab, and Microsoft Azure DevOps repositories and use them to provision resources through Terraform Enterprise and Terraform Cloud.
  • Detect Terraform Infrastructure as Code (IaC) template changes and create a catalog item or update the catalog item with a new template version.
  • Use the IaC change task workflow to handle changes to catalog items due to template changes.
  • Specify metadata to populate the catalog item form fields and values.
  • Reduce the Terraform Enterprise license cost by using workspaces that you've already discovered from your version control system (VCS) to provision cloud infrastructure.
ITOM Optimization
ITOM Optimization provides automation for the cloud workflows used to manage the cloud resources throughout their life cycle. It enables certified and enterprise-compliant cloud deployment, cost visibility, and other cloud management processes.
ITOM Licensing
ITOM enables you to view the total number of licenses assigned to your applications and CIs. This subscription provides the enhanced capability of viewing which CIs you have a license for. You can view the subscription breakdown for ITOM Health, ITOM Visibility, ITOM Optimization, and ITOM Cloud Accelerate. For details, see View which CIs have an ITOM license.