Integrating With ServiceNow for a Single Source Of Truth

Network operations teams rely on highly specialized tools developed by individual vendors designed to address particular problems. The result? Most enterprises have 10+ Network Operations applications in place and they don’t talk to each other—which means that network operations engineers spend an exhaustive and unnecessary amount of time toggling between applications and sifting through information […]

Network operations teams rely on highly specialized tools developed by individual vendors designed to address particular problems. The result? Most enterprises have 10+ Network Operations applications in place and they don’t talk to each other—which means that network operations engineers spend an exhaustive and unnecessary amount of time toggling between applications and sifting through information as they work to resolve tickets. Multiple tools providing state information introduces inconsistencies in the data accuracy and level of detail.

Because information is not portable between applications or is vendor-specific, inaccessible because it’s siloed due to security boundaries across the network, or current, the teams charged with network and security operations are at a disadvantage. When people working to solve a problem have incorrect, incomplete, or out-of-date information they cannot efficiently solve problems.

We don’t think it should be that hard

Forward Networks was created to make the hard parts of network operations easier. For us, that means giving instant access to the information you need to troubleshoot and resolve network issues.

The Forward Networks platform is based on a mathematical model that creates a digital twin of the network. This software-based twin provides a comprehensive visualization of all possible network paths, a searchable index of configurations presented in a vendor-neutral manner easily understandable for even tier-one support specialists, the ability to verify network behavior, and predict how NAT or ACL changes will impact the network. Network state information is updated at regular intervals determined by the operations team.

To ease the burden on network operations teams, we’ve developed an integration between Forward Networks and ServiceNow that provides a single source of truth for the network and enables more efficient use of both platforms. The integration between the applications allows engineers to automatically share relevant details about network state, configuration, and behavior with everyone working on resolving this issue. This information automatically updates within both platforms creating a detailed and current single source of truth. The integration between the two applications takes only seconds to enable and configure.

Reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR)

A typical incident response involves several teams, the network operations engineer who got the call, maybe the apps team or security team, more senior engineers if the case needs to be escalated. The difficulty of resolving issues is compounded when everyone is working from their own assumptions and data. One of the most effective ways to reduce mean time to resolution is by creating an accurate single source of truth and ensuring everyone involved has access to it.

Because Forward Networks regularly verifies that the network is behaving as intended, it can (at the discretion of the network operation team) proactively open, update ServiceNow incidents based on these verification checks. Whether incidents are created automatically or manually, a link to the relevant data becomes part of the incident and is updated as the system collects network state information, this ensures everyone is working from the same information. For existing ServiceNow incidents, the Forward Networks integration allows network engineers to capture relevant information and add it to the incident, again saving the resolution team time they would have spent researching the issue.

This integration also allows networks operations to verify that the changes they’ve made have resolved the issue by running a query. The platform will show if the issue is resolved or allow the engineer solving the issue to see how their change impacted the network and what else may be causing the issue, this way tickets can be followed through to resolution. Incident history can be viewed from within Forward Networks or ServiceNow allowing the engineering team to see all actions and status from their platform of choice.

The real benefit of this integration is immediate access to information that reduces the mean time to resolution from hours to minutes for most problems.