Bi-directional data synchronizations of Dev tools with Remedyforce

What do DevOps and ITSM have in common?

DevOps is all about collaboration and flexibility. Thanks to its set of philosophies, practices, and tools, based on those two principles, it helps businesses create more reliable and useful products. The core idea behind DevOps sounds so good that many companies are tempted to leave behind years of experience in operating in an ITIL-based environment, to become more productive with DevOps.

However, ITIL, and ITSM in particular, are not so different from DevOps in terms of end goals. After all, it all boils down to successfully managing teams in a way that the company can provide a high-quality product to the end customer.

The major disadvantages of operating exclusively within an ITIL-based frame are, as follows:

• The processes and flows are heavy,
• They lack automation,
• They are too people-dependent.

How can those problems be addressed?

Remedyforce  a service desk tool or something more?

Incident management within a given organization heavily relies on ticketing and on the service desks functioning. This plays a fundamental role in ITSM, but also in the Ops part of DevOps.

Built on top of the Salesforce Cloud, Remedyforce is a lightweight and agile service desk system. In fact, its exactly the system that many companies need, in order to optimize their processes. Lightweight doesn't mean that it lacks any critical capabilities, though. It comes with a robust set of functionalities, like a service catalog, and incident and change management. These capacities allow organizations to use Remedyforce for their most common use cases, such as software updates that break a given functionality, or network bottlenecks.

The role of integrations in addressing important business challenges

Integrations are key in DevOps for many reasons. They improve the automation of processes, simplify collaboration, reduce the time to fix issues, help with effective root-cause analysis, enhance customer experience and satisfaction, and many, many more.

Recently, the majority of vendors of IT solutions started providing out-of-the-box connectors to support some basic use cases, and this model is proven to be very feasible, practical, and cost-effective. Although this might be useful in some situations, we have seen the necessity of integrating on a deeper level. We do this to match our customers ideas of managing their business processes, automation, and DevOps in general.

This is where ZigiOps can help, with its capabilities to comprehensively integrate many different tools. This provides our clients with the flexibility they need to optimize their operations. Some of the most common examples are:

• CMDB synchronization
• Monitoring discovery to CMDB population
• Monitoring problems to incidents
• Bi-directional synchronization (CLIP).

Examples of Remedyforce-DevOps integrations

Based on the data virtualization technology behind it, ZigiOps offers a wide variety of ETL flows that solve some of the most complex use cases, such as:

• Full data synchronization of monitoring tools with Remedyforce CMDB
• Bi-directional incident management exchange between monitoring tools and Remedyforce
• Change management automation
• Bi-directional data synchronizations of Dev tools with Remedyforce

And more.

Schedule a demo and see how ZigiOps can help you streamline your business.

BMC Remedyforce  in Action

One of the most popular combinations that highlight the benefits of using BMC Remedyforce is its integration with a popular DevOps tool like Jira via ZigiOps.

Before linking the two systems, we will have to install and log into ZigiOps. It is easy and happens in less than three minutes. Upon that, we land on the simple Dashboard. Thanks to its simple and user-friendly design, it saves the user time that is usually being wasted in searching through all the available options.

The next step is checking the connection status of the systems we aim to link  BMC Remedyforce and Jira, in our case. Once the connection is verified, we can proceed with the integration. Our next move is to go to the Configurator menu and add Remedyforce to Jira from the list of pre-defined integrations available in ZigiOps.

Next, we add both systems to the chosen integration template and mark the items we want to synchronize. Then, we can save the newly created integration. We can check all filters and field mappings. If we want, we can easily customize the configuration. This happens directly from ZigiOps simple UI. Our next move would be to enable the operations we have configured.

Now that the integration is ready and working, we can dive deeper and see it in practice. To do that, we will open a new incident in Remedyforce. Once saved, we can go to Jira and refresh our task list. As a result, we will find the task that was just opened in Remedyforce.

We can make updates to it  including regular fields, commands, and attachments. We can now go back to the Remedyforce system and see that the previously created incident is updated. This signifies the synchronization between BMC Remedyforce and Jira, achieved via ZigiOps bi-directional connection. We can do the same updates in Remedyforce, and the changes will be available in Jira, also.