Bowen Chen
Mona Ranadive
ServiceNow is a popular IT service management platform for recording, tracking, and managing a company's enterprise-level IT processes in a single location. In addition to helping you manage your ServiceNow CMDB, Datadog integrates with ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) and IT Service Management (ITSM), enabling you to automatically create and manage ServiceNow incidents and events from the Datadog platform. By configuring your Datadog applications for use with ITOM and ITSM, you can reduce the time between when a service issue occurs and when a ServiceNow ticket reaches IT operators and admins, as well as manage your resolution workflow within the Datadog platform.
In this post, we’ll discuss how to:
- Automatically create ServiceNow tickets when monitor alerts are triggered
- Resolve tickets faster with Datadog Case Management bidirectional syncing and Datadog Event Management event correlation
- Respond with Datadog Incident Management while keeping records bidirectionally synced in ServiceNow
Automatically create ServiceNow tickets when alerts are triggered
When issues with your IT services and devices occur, alerting your IT team quickly can be critical to securing your network devices and boosting productivity. Using Datadog’s ServiceNow integration, you can automatically create support tickets when your Datadog monitors are triggered and send the tickets to the ServiceNow ticketing queue. From there, your support team will be notified of issues by the communication workflows that you have already established inside ServiceNow.
You can configure your ServiceNow monitor notifications for ITOM and ITSM from within our integration tile, where you can create templates for different ServiceNow instances. Our instance priority mapping feature will automatically assign impact and urgency levels to each of your ServiceNow tickets based on your Datadog monitor’s priority level, helping your IT team understand the ticket’s severity and prioritize a response. You can also map other fields such as assignment groups, business service, user, and team to be included within the ServiceNow integration tile. For a full list of mappable fields, check out our documentation.
After you configure your instance template, all you have to do is mention @servicenow-<TEMPLATE_NAME> in the alert message or add it to the notification list for that monitor. Each monitor alert will generate a corresponding incident in ServiceNow. When the monitor resolves, the ServiceNow incident will automatically resolve as well.
This configuration can be noisy, potentially generating thousands of tickets in ServiceNow. Noise is especially possible if the monitor is flappy (in other words, if the monitor rapidly switches back and forth between OK and ALERT status). However, this approach works well for organizations whose teams primarily operate in ServiceNow.
Resolve tickets faster with bidirectional syncing and event correlation
Datadog Case Management offers a centralized ticketing and response system to triage, track, and remediate issues. With Datadog’s ServiceNow integration, you can bidirectionally sync your Datadog cases and ServiceNow tickets. After you configure the integration, any changes to your ServiceNow tickets will automatically be reflected in the corresponding Datadog case, and vice versa.
Bidirectional syncing links all remediation updates between Datadog and ServiceNow, giving each case responder equal visibility into the issue at hand. Responders can manage their case investigations directly in Datadog—where they can pivot to relevant observability and security data—while automatically updating their ServiceNow tickets to maintain a system of record.
With case creation, you can automatically or manually create a case from a monitor alert and work on the alert from within Case Management. Using the ServiceNow integration, you can also create a ServiceNow incident from that case. The incident will resolve automatically when the case resolves. To minimize manual cleanup, you can toggle on functionality to automatically close cases when the monitor group resolves. This approach works well for teams that use Datadog as a system of operation and ServiceNow as a system of record.
Additionally, Datadog Event Management correlates events from Datadog and third-party systems to ongoing cases. It reduces alert fatigue by using pattern-based and intelligent recognition to remove duplicate events. By navigating to your case’s Investigation tab, you can accelerate your troubleshooting by investigating each correlated alert. If the underlying alerts return to a stable state, Datadog automatically resolves the associated ServiceNow ticket to help your teams stay focused on active issues.
This functionality significantly reduces noise because a single ServiceNow incident can represent many related alerts. If alerts flap, they are still tied to the same ServiceNow incident, which resolves automatically when all related alerts are cleared.
Respond with Incident Management while keeping records bidirectionally synced in ServiceNow
When incidents arise, you need your teams to respond quickly and efficiently. Datadog Incident Management provides a single source of truth for incident response, alongside tools to triage and assign remediation efforts.
By configuring our integration for ITOM and ITSM, you can conditionally create ServiceNow incidents from Datadog incidents. As with Datadog cases, incidents within Datadog and ServiceNow stay synchronized. The status, severity, and timeline are bidirectionally synced between the platforms.
This configuration is the least noisy integration method, ideal for organizations that work in both Datadog and ServiceNow. Often, developers manage incidents in Datadog while other teams (e.g., Support) operate in ServiceNow. With Incident Management, developers can continue working in Datadog while incidents remain visible and tracked in ServiceNow, the system of record.
Sync ServiceNow with Datadog
If you want to integrate Datadog's alerting capabilities with ServiceNow, sign up for a 14-day free trial of Datadog. If you're a Datadog customer, get started by installing the ServiceNow integration and importing our update set, or by installing our app from the ServiceNow app store. By subscribing to updates in the app store, you’ll be notified when new releases are available.
You can learn more in the documentation for our ServiceNow integration and the blog post about our ServiceNow CMDB integration.
