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ServiceNow’s latest release is San Diego, which has been available to purchase since 23rd March 2022. We’ve put together an overview of (what we think are) the most exciting new highlights from each ServiceNow product area. This article will be covering ITSM, ITOM and ITAM; from brand new workspaces and improved license compliance to enhanced reporting and sleek new designs, keep reading to see why San Diego is worth your business’s time.
ITSM (IT Service Management)
Next Experience UI
The Next Experience provides users with a modern Windows-esque design and unifies the apps in your instance. This unified navigation enables users to access content from various sources in one pane such as UI16 forms, lists, and dashboards in the same pane as a Workspace. The landing page replaces the older style home page and dashboards providing all the information needed to start work.
The whole UI makes everything easier, especially for new users to find their way around, set things up and personalise their experience. This is a fundamental shift towards a workspace experience.
Service Operations Workspace
There is now a new Service Operations Workspace enabling analysts to prioritize issues through an overview of outages, service announcements, and assignments.
Manageability of tasks is easier, thanks to contextual information and targeted actions.
Tailored recommendations for quick incident resolution.
Ability to reach out to experts on-call for high-priority tasks, and collaborate with the requester and colleagues from within a task.
Request Management
Order guide sequencing has been introduced, meaning that Joiner/Mover/leaver items (for example) can be done in a sequence rather than altogether, increasing coherency.
There is also a further enhanced the ability to rapidly build workflows by using templates and using conditional service fulfilment steps.
Overview Dashboards
New Next Experience visual design-compliant per process overview and premium dashboards. The widgets on the dashboard are optimised for the screen that you're using (desktop, tablet, or phone). Users can easily drag and drop widgets precisely where they want them and rearrange the dashboard with the available tools.
Walk Up Experience
ITSM enhancements include an improved user experience for the hybrid workforce (which is arguably the most common type of work now, post-pandemic!). With this, it’s simple to book and manage all walk-up appointments via the self-service portal. Requesters can get served virtually by the agents through Microsoft Teams interactions.
There is skill-based routing to specified site kiosks, multiple appointment booking and the ability to associate walk-up appointments and interactions to an incident more smoothly.
ITOM (IT Operations Management)
New in Visibility
San Diego includes three Discovery & Service Mapping patterns that were previously only available in the ServiceNow Store. The following are now included as standard: Citrix Xen Hyper-V, Cloudian Storage and Infinibox.
There are also Discovery Pattern enhancements for several technologies. Kubernetes has seen improved pattern execution and now collected information on Ingress, ReplicaSets and ReplicationController. In addition, this enhancement adds relations between existing and newly added components. Docker now collects additional information for container repositories.
For those customers requiring the very highest security levels, Discovery now supports gMSA (or Grouped Managed Service Accounts). This is a secure Windows account that provides a higher security option for non-interactive access, meaning a superior secure access.
New in Event Management
Improved efficiencies of the MID Web Server authentication between the server and client, due to mutual authentication.
Tag-based alert grouping is now available, using the new advanced non-code alert clustering engine.
Alert filters for automatic grouping to exclude specific alerts based on certain criteria; there are also group alerts without a CI in pattern-based or text-based groups.
MID server enhancements
Multiple API keys for incoming authentication requests from clients
Several new connectors have been added, including Azure Bi-directional, Login Monitor, Lightstep, ThousandEyes, Prometheus and Oracle Cloud.
ITAM (IT Asset Management)
New in Software Asset Management
The release includes auto-allocation of software requests via Virtual Agent, improved licence compliance and optimisation of Microsoft SQL Server and Windows Server resources deployed on clusters.
Users now have the ability to import Microsoft entitlements and agreements directly from a Microsoft Licence Statement (MLS), rather than needing to use the default entitlement template.
A brand new workflow is included, to assist with the IT asset offboarding process for reclaiming software licences from returned devices.
New in Hardware Asset Management
The new Hardware Asset Workspace helps optimise costs and mitigate compliance risks by using data visibility, notifications, and actionable alerts.
The new ‘Reclaim Asset’ catalogue item has prescriptive workflows to streamline the process of reclaiming hardware assets from Movers and Leavers.
New in Cloud Insights
San Diego includes enhanced reporting to assist with making the very most of cloud provider reservation plans.
Users can now create and monitor custom budget plans for cloud resources to see how budgets are faring. Information includes to-date and forecast spend against the plan, as well as any projected variance from this.
There’s a LOT to be excited about, and this isn’t even all of it...stay tuned for more enticing updates in part two!
If you’d like to know more about how Unifii can help you upgrade to San Diego, or extend your use of the platform, please get in touch with one of the team here.
