A Deep Dive into the Modern Organization’s IT Ecosystem

In today’s fast-paced business environment, companies need to stay competitive while maintaining operational efficiency. The IT infrastructure and toolset of a company are crucial in reaching this objective. It's vital to monitor the key processes and operations that support the IT ecosystem, as even small problems—if not addressed—can lead to major disruptions. Organizations that neglect to invest in strong monitoring and management solutions risk experiencing significant downtimes, financial losses, and damage to their reputation.

The Role of Workflow Optimization and Automation

To ensure organizational balance and improve customer satisfaction, businesses must focus on optimizing their workflows. Automating repetitive tasks not only helps to reduce human errors but also saves valuable resources—both financial and human. By streamlining processes, companies can enhance productivity, boost efficiency, and maintain seamless operations across teams. Automation also alleviates the workload for employees, allowing IT professionals to dedicate their efforts to more strategic tasks instead of getting mired in routine operational challenges. By implementing automation in IT service management, companies can achieve quicker response times, better resource allocation, and improved customer experiences, ultimately leading to higher satisfaction rates and operational success. A key factor in achieving this is the selection of the right technology stack. While the market is filled with various solutions, OpsBridge and ServiceNow have emerged as leaders in the industry, helping enterprises effectively manage and optimize their IT operations. These tools have become essential for large organizations that require real-time visibility, workflow automation, and proactive issue resolution.

OpsBridge and ServiceNow: Pros and Cons

Both OpsBridge and ServiceNow offer a host of features tailored to IT operations and service management, but each system has its strengths and weaknesses.

OpsBridge Pros:

• Comprehensive Monitoring: Provides deep visibility into IT resources, including applications, servers, networks, and databases. With this level of monitoring, IT teams can proactively detect and address potential failures before they disrupt business operations.

• Proactive Issue Detection: Identifies problems before they escalate, reducing downtime. By using AI-driven analytics, OpsBridge ensures that IT teams stay ahead of potential issues, minimizing service disruptions and improving reliability.

• Event Correlation & Root Cause Analysis: Automates event management, helping IT teams prioritize critical incidents. By eliminating unnecessary noise and identifying dependencies between IT components, OpsBridge allows businesses to focus on key events that require attention.

• Scalability: Supports large-scale IT environments with ease. Enterprises that manage extensive networks, cloud infrastructures, and hybrid IT ecosystems can rely on OpsBridge to offer consistent and high-quality monitoring across all layers of their IT landscape.

OpsBridge Cons:

• Complex Setup: Initial configuration can be challenging and time-consuming, requiring skilled IT professionals to set up and fine-tune the system to meet business requirements.

• Integration Limitations: Requires additional tools for seamless data exchange with external platforms like ServiceNow, which can increase costs and complexity.

• High Learning Curve: IT teams may need extensive training to fully utilize its capabilities. Without proper onboarding, organizations might not leverage the full potential of OpsBridge, leading to inefficient workflows.

ServiceNow Pros:

• User-Friendly Interface: Intuitive design makes IT service management straightforward, allowing IT teams and end-users to interact with the platform easily without extensive technical knowledge.

• Workflow Automation: Enhances efficiency by automating incident and request management, reducing manual intervention and expediting service fulfillment.

• Extensive Customization: Adaptable to specific business needs and workflows, ensuring that organizations can tailor the platform to their unique operational demands.

• Cloud-Based Flexibility: Enables remote access and scalability, making it an ideal choice for enterprises with a global workforce that requires seamless service management from anywhere.

ServiceNow Cons:

• Cost: Premium pricing can be a barrier for smaller enterprises, making it less accessible for organizations with limited budgets.

• Customization Challenges: Highly tailored implementations require significant development efforts, sometimes leading to prolonged deployment timelines and additional costs.

• Performance Issues: Large enterprises may experience slowdowns when processing high volumes of data, necessitating robust infrastructure and performance tuning to maintain optimal operation speeds.

Why Businesses Aim to Integrate ServiceNow and OpsBridge

Companies seek to integrate OpsBridge and ServiceNow to streamline their IT operations and enhance service management. The integration aims to:

• Automate Data Flow: Eliminates manual data transfers, reducing errors and improving efficiency. Automation ensures that incidents, alerts, and updates are consistently synchronized between both platforms.

• Accelerate Incident Resolution: Ensures that critical alerts from OpsBridge are promptly addressed in ServiceNow, leading to faster response times and reduced downtime.

• Improve Collaboration: Enhances communication between IT Operations and Service Management teams by ensuring that all relevant stakeholders have access to real-time information.

• Enhance Visibility: Provides a unified view of IT performance and incident status, allowing IT teams to make data-driven decisions and optimize resource allocation.

Challenges & Setbacks in Integrating OpsBridge and ServiceNow

Despite the benefits, companies often face several challenges when integrating these systems:

• Data Inconsistencies: Differences in data formats and structures can cause synchronization issues, leading to incomplete or inaccurate data transfers.

• Technical Complexity: Many integrations require coding expertise, increasing implementation time and costs. Businesses often struggle to find skilled professionals to handle integration challenges.

• Scalability Issues: Some solutions struggle to handle growing enterprise needs, making them less suitable for businesses with rapidly evolving IT environments.

• Latency Problems: Delays in data synchronization can impact incident response times, leading to prolonged resolution cycles and increased downtime.

• Security Concerns: Ensuring safe and compliant data exchange is critical, as mishandled integrations can lead to data breaches and compliance violations.

Choosing the Right Integration Solution

Selecting the ideal integration solution requires evaluating key factors, including:

• No-Code/Low-Code Implementation: Eliminates the need for extensive development work, allowing IT teams to integrate systems quickly and efficiently.

• Bi-Directional Synchronization: Ensures real-time updates between OpsBridge and ServiceNow, reducing inconsistencies and enhancing operational transparency.

• Scalability: Must support enterprise growth and increasing data volumes to ensure long-term viability.

• Customization Flexibility: Adapts to specific business needs and workflows, allowing organizations to tailor the integration to their unique requirements.

• Security & Compliance: Meets industry standards for data protection, ensuring secure and compliant data exchanges.

• Reliability & Performance: Delivers seamless data flow without delays, minimizing the risk of operational bottlenecks.

How ZigiOps Resolves Integration Challenges

ZigiOps stands out as the ultimate solution for integrating OpsBridge and ServiceNow. Here’s how it addresses the common setbacks:

• Instant No-Code Integration: Deploys in under five minutes without requiring a developer, making integration seamless and hassle-free.

• Seamless Sync: Ensures data is consistently updated across both platforms, improving accuracy and decision-making.

• Enhanced Data Mapping: Converts and aligns different data formats for smooth exchange, ensuring complete data integrity.

• Automated Workflows: Eliminates manual intervention, reducing errors and response times, leading to a more efficient IT ecosystem.

• Scalability & Performance: Handles enterprise-scale integrations with high reliability, making it a future-proof solution.

• Robust Security Framework: Ensures data is transferred securely, maintaining compliance with industry regulations.

But let’s look at the practical side – how OpsBridge integrates with ServiceNow via ZigiOps.

Setting Up the OpsBridge-ServiceNow Integration with ZigiOps

Getting started with the OpsBridge-ServiceNow integration via ZigiOps is a straightforward process, whether you're using the on-premises or cloud-based version of the tool.

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1.For On-Prem Users:

Begin by installing ZigiOps on your local environment. Ensure that all system prerequisites are met before proceeding with the installation.

• For Cloud Users: Simply log in to the ZigiOps UI—no installation required.

Regardless of the deployment method, the integration process is seamless and requires only a few clicks to establish a robust connection between OpsBridge and ServiceNow, enabling efficient data synchronization and automated workflows.

Navigating ZigiOps: Setting Up the OpsBridge-ServiceNow Integration

Upon logging into ZigiOps, you’ll be greeted by the Dashboard, which provides a comprehensive overview of your integrations. Here, you can monitor the health status of active connections, check license details, access troubleshooting tools, and explore additional system insights.

One of ZigiOps' standout features is its intuitive, no-code configuration, allowing users to set up integrations with ease.

Configuring the OBM to ServiceNow Integration

From the menu, choose the platforms you want to connect. In this case, select OpenText OpsBridge and ServiceNow as your integration endpoints.  

NB! Before doing so, ZigiOps needs to establish a connection with each of the systems separately, before proceeding with their integration.  

Connecting ZigiOps to OpsBridge Manager (OBM)

Connecting ZigiOps to OpsBridge Manager is crucial, and it happens fast and easy. It requires users to fill in the following fields:

• Instance URL (this requires the input of the user’s OBM instance url address)

• Username  

• Password

• Downtime Service Username

• Downtime Service Password

• RTSM Username

• RTMS Password

Once that’s done – SAVE and TEST must be clicked. This will allow ZigiOps to finish the connection with the system.

‍Connecting ZigiOps to ServiceNow

Just like with OpsBridge, ZigiOps must be successfully connected to ServiceNow, too. The information needed to do so is:

• ServiceNow Instance URL address

• Authentication type (either Basic Auth or OAuth)

• Username   and  

• Password

Then we click on SAVE and TEST.

A great benefit of ZigiOps is the presence of a large library with pre-built templates. This saves a lot of time and efforts to the users. Each of the pre-built templates can be additionally customized to fit the current needs of the upcoming integration. Furthermore, ZigiOps allows users to import their own integration templates – if the situation calls for it.

OpsBridge to ServiceNow integration template

Once the precise integration template is picked, it’s time to proceed with the integration.  

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In the current use case scenario, the OBM to ServiceNow integration is for transferring OpsBridge events to ServiceNow incidents. As visible from the screenshot above, ZigiOps can perform three actions – Create Incident, Fetch Incident and Update Incident. This is possible through the use of ZigiOps Web Listener (the ZigiOps Generic Connector) as a bridge between OBM and ServiceNow.  

The entities that the integration aims to transfer from one system to another are also visible – OBM events and ServiceNow incidents.  

The 2 tabs – Source and Target represent the two prospect integrated systems – OBM and ServiceNow.  

Each tab has a multitude of fields that allow more detailed overview of how ZigiOps executes the integration – different types of information extracted and transferred.

Update Incident action

The action of updating an incident in the OpsBridge to ServiceNow integration through the ZigiOps results in the following: this opens a listener on ZigiOps  which will listen and receive any updated already-transferred events from OBM.

Let’s look at the Field map function. Field Mapping is essential for determining the data we want to send to the target system. It outlines which fields need to be created or updated and specifies the values that should be assigned to them. These values usually come from the source system.  

What’s important to note here is that ZigiOps allows users to add as many fields as they need – just as seen in the screenshot above. From OBM side, the transfer of data to the ZigiOps listener happens in this way:

• POST http://{host}:9090/listener/omi/event_change/{external_id} Request body:

• short_description = {title}

• description = {description}

• state = {state} urgency = {severity}

• impact = {priority}

• category = {category}

• sub_category = {sub_category}

• cmdb_ci/name = {node_ref/node/name}

And in response, the users will receive Response code: 200

Fetch Incident action

When selected, the Fetch Incident functionality opens a listener on ZigiOps which will listen and receive any OBM requests from transferred events “forwarding tab” to update its properties from related ServiceNow incident.  

In the fields below we can see our specified source systems (OBM) and the entity extracted – OBM events. The trigger is defined to be our ZigiOps web listener, while the method of data extraction - “get”. Again, the field map section gives the opportunity to add/remove as many fields and their values as the integration needs.  

We also have Respond field map functionality. In general, a response field map in integrations outlines how data returned from the target system is mapped back to the source system after an action is performed. This mapping is essential for ensuring that important response data is correctly transferred and logged in the original system.

To sum up, when the fetch an incident action is initiated, OBM send the following data to the ZigiOps web listener:

• GET http://{host}:9090/listener/omi/event/{external_id}  

• Request body:number = {external_id}  

And in response, the web listener returns:  

• state = {state}

• severity = {urgency}

• priority = {priority}

• assigned_user = {assigned_to}

• assigned_group = {assignment_group}

Backsync OBM event

The backsync is yet another action that can be performed by the ZigiOps platform within the ServiceNow integration to OpsBridge. In its essence, ZigiOps queries ServiceNow incident table for any incidents that were created by the integration process with OBM and were recently updated by ServiceNow user/s.  

Those updates are collected and reported immediately to the related events in the OpsBridge instance.  

From the image below we can see all the important fields – such as Instance (ServiceNow in our case), entity type (Incident). The trigger here is polling. It’s time interval varies, depending on the occasion – here we have minutes.  

The filters’ fields can be adjusted per need – additional ones can be added and unnecessary ones removed in seconds without jeopardizing the integration process.  

The backsync event table is also visible with its related fields and values.  

‍To summarize all

Technology is essential for modern businesses, helping to optimize workflows and improve overall efficiency. It allows organizations to meet their goals more effectively while maintaining high levels of satisfaction among end users. Monitoring and automating IT infrastructure processes are vital. The capability to identify and fix issues before they impact internal operations is crucial. Moreover, a smooth flow of information and synchronization across teams and departments leads to more efficient business operations.  

Tools like OpsBridge and ServiceNow are instrumental in this process, providing extensive features that deliver significant advantages, particularly when they are integrated. By linking OpsBridge and ServiceNow through a no-code integration platform such as ZigiOps, organizations can quickly transfer important data between the two systems without manual effort. ZigiOps facilitates seamless integration, ensuring that any changes made in one system are automatically updated in the other. This real-time synchronization guarantees that all gathered data is accessible at any time and from any location, improving visibility, decision-making, and operational efficiency.