Introducing Our Newest Integration with ServiceNow

Blameless just released a new integration to ServiceNow’s incident management ticketing solution. If you are a modern DevOps team moving towards SRE practices and you want to speed the time to incident resolution through streamlined, automated workflows, this is worth investigating. 

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Why Is This Integration Important to ServiceNow Customers?

As you modernize on-call processes and streamline how you manage incidents from start to finish, it’s important to assemble the right team-members. It’s usually whoever’s on call and, if you decide to escalate, a relevant subject matter expert. A streamlined step-by-step process removes the heavy lift and unnecessary distractions and allows responders to focus their energy on investigation and resolution. Automated workflows are critical. Most important of all is the data capture as the incident progresses.

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ServiceNow does an excellent job tracking an incident lifecycle via ticket assignment and updating reports on progress and close. However, when incidents have the potential to impact customers, it’s critical to alert and assemble relevant experts as quickly as possible. DevOps and on-call engineers that focus on reliability need a tool to support this important first step. Without it, time ticks away and frustration mounts, because those working the incident lack the knowledge to adequately investigate.

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Incident Roles, Workflows and Data Collection

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Once an incident is acknowledged and the right team is assembled, you start to triage. With teams working remotely, communications and tasks are done straight from Slack or MS Teams. Time is of the essence. In a matter of seconds, you create the dedicated channel and incident timeline tracking begins. Beginning data collection here is critical for developing the insights your team needs to refine incident response going forward. With this new feature, you start the incident in Blameless,Slack or Microsoft Teams which automatically creates a ServiceNow ticket containing the title and description of the incident, along with other required fields mapped and updated for ongoing visibility in both ServiceNow and Blameless.

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The Blameless incident workflow makes it easy for teams to collaborate while leaving the door open to fully automate. Incident type, severity, description and roles can all be automatically assigned, according to the runbook you’ve configured. Then nudge the team to move forward and keep other stakeholders in the loop with automated communications. Context switching is much easier because you can go back and forth between ServiceNow and Blameless to track progress and outstanding tasks with all details at your fingertips.

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What’s A Typical Use-Case? Adopt A Modern Incident Management Approach

With a rotating on-call schedule across engineering and DevOps, you quickly assemble, investigate and resolve, with reduced impact to customers. Because you track all the important steps including the timeline, you share reports and retrospectives with different stakeholders. ServiceNow retains the master record for all incident tracking but you’re doing the actual work in Blameless.

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For organizations that have traditionally run an ITIL process with perhaps a NOC (network operations center), you can now easily move to a more streamlined approach with Blameless and ServiceNow.

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Becoming Decentralized

Moving towards a cloud native or microservices architecture creates the necessity to adopt a more streamlined incident management approach. With Blameless and ServiceNow together, you can navigate that transition incrementally while still maintaining that master record which is continually updated.

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Who Is This Useful For?

The integration of Blameless and ServiceNow is hugely beneficial for organizations who are trying to improve their customer’s experience while reducing the operational load on their engineering team. Every engineer or DevOps team member that runs or manages an incident benefits from a system that auto-assigns roles based on configured presets AND puts incident runbooks at their fingertips. Unlike legacy tools, Blameless has the flexibility to be configured to match whatever specific functional roles your organization utilizes.

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The built-in dashboards available in Blameless can also play an important role in your teams continuous improvement. Knowing mean time to resolution (MTTR) is critical to identifying which parts of your service are experiencing frequent incidents and helping prioritize and shift resources around to avoid customer impact.

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Management teams also have access to the output, post incident, through customizable retrospective reports or postmortems. Blameless allows you to flexibly share those beyond the core engineering group, so leadership or other critical stakeholders can also participate in maintaining or improving reliability. Adding tools for postmortem, in particular, can play a major role in reducing the likelihood of a repeat occurrence. This is just one more unique element of Blameless that makes it a powerful complement to ServiceNow.

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Why Should I Buy Blameless If I Have Servicenow?

Slow or ineffective incident response poses a serious business risk, especially when customers are impacted. Poor reliability can compromise your customer experience, and an outdated process for managing reliability can overwhelm your engineering or DevOps team. If incidents of any type or severity are slowing you down, or your team spends too much time acknowledging and assembling vs. resolving, you need a modern solution like Blameless and ServiceNow together.

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This is an opportunity to mature your reliability engineering practices. The ITIL methodologies that worked for monolithic applications and centralized teams are insufficient to maintain reliability in a microservices architecture. Modern digital applications require proactive monitoring, alerting and tracking with swift action and resolution across a distributed, nimble team, and here, Blameless has you covered.

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Want to watch a step-by-step demo? Nicolas Philip, Product Director at Blameless, recorded a video to show you how to create ServiceNow incident tickets from your preferred chat tool or the Blameless interface.

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Using Jira Too?

If your engineers rely on Jira to track outstanding items, you can integrate to both ServiceNow and Jira, concurrently, once an incident starts. This avoids any wasted time collecting data post incident and it’s all available at your fingertips for any team to review. That’s unique and extremely valuable to cut toil and give precious time back to all teams.

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We’d love to hear from you. If you use ServiceNow and want to streamline incident response with a purpose-built automation tool, Blameless is ready to partner with you on your reliability journey. Schedule a chat with our technical experts by visiting www.blameless.com/demo. Or if you want, talk to us on Twitter @blamelesshq. 

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