Dynatrace integration certified for the ServiceNow New York release

This week, the updated Dynatrace integration for ServiceNow was certified and published for the ServiceNow New York release. Our updated integration comes with a lot of enhancements and stability improvements while keeping the underlying CMDB model stable.

What’s new at a glance

• More visibility through synchronization of Dynatrace Smartscape information with your CMDB
• Tidier ServiceNow CMDB by cleaning-up non-operational CIs
• Increased stability of CMDB synchronization through identification engine (IRE)
• Possibility to create and update service maps within your ServiceNow ITOM dashboards using the new service mapping API
• Further performance improvements

Upgrade now to the new Dynatrace ServiceNow integration (version 2.5). You’ll find it in the ServiceNow store. You can also upgrade directly from within your ServiceNow instance. The image below shows the Dynatrace integration in the ServiceNow marketplace:

More visibility by synchronizing Dynatrace Smartscape information with your CMDB

To give you more visibility, the newly certified Dynatrace ServiceNow integration introduces additional features that improve synchronization of your Dynatrace Smartscape information with your CMDB.

See host-to-host relationships in your CMDB

One of the newly introduced capabilities is the synchronization of host-to-host relationships. Whenever Dynatrace Smartscape shows a host-communication relationship with another host, this information is transferred to your CMDB:

See a list of running applications in your CMDB

Another enhancement to the previous version of the integration is the synchronization of running application processes as Applications on the server, as shown in the screenshot above. Either the application process is further classified, such as a Tomcat application server, or the generic application CI (Configuration Item) type is used to report running applications.

Discover more enhancements in the Dynatrace ServiceNow integration

Following is an overview of other improvements you’ll find in your Dynatrace ServiceNow integration.

Clean up non-operational CIs in your ServiceNow CMDB

We’ve responded to your questions about how to automatically decommission Dynatrace-introduced CIs (Configuration Items) in a ServiceNow CMDB.

Dynatrace-introduced CIs do provide information about the date and time when they were first seen within your environment and when they were last monitored. This “last seen” timestamp is updated to reflect when the CI is no longer monitored, either because the Dynatrace OneAgent was disabled or the CI was shut down.

Within the ServiceNow New York release, the Dynatrace integration includes a scheduled job called Dynatrace Inactivate Undiscoverable CIs that implements a default decommissioning strategy for Dynatrace CIs.

As many companies implement their own strategies, this script is deactivated by default and can be activated on demand. Once activated, this script automatically checks all Dynatrace-introduced CIs and sets the operational_status of CIs that are no longer monitored to nonoperational.

Increased stability of CMDB synchronization through the identification engine (IRE)

The Dynatrace integration has used the identification and reconciliation engine (IRE) for two years now to correctly import CIs into the ServiceNow CMDB. In the past, Dynatrace sent all host-related information in one IRE payload. The downside to this approach was that the IRE either accepted or rejected the message in its entirety.

To make our IRE import process more stable, we’ve now split the IRE host message into individual messages. Thus, we can create the host CI even if one of the application processes isn’t accepted by the IRE. With this improvement, you now have a more stable IRE import process.

Easily create and update service maps in your ServiceNow ITOM dashboards with the new service mapping API

Dynatrace worked closely with ServiceNow in leveraging the reporting of service maps to the IT Operations Module (ITOM). What was previously only possible through a companion script in ServiceNow Madrid is now fully integrated as a standard interface in the ServiceNow New York release.

Dynatrace is one of the first monitoring vendors that directly leverages this newly introduced option to create service maps as a third-party monitoring tool.

The screenshots below show how Dynatrace creates and updates service maps in ServiceNow ITOM dashboards.

Performance improvements

With this new release, we’ve switched from synchronous to asynchronous CI mapping of Dynatrace-reported incidents.

Moreover, we’ve also enabled ignore-cache on Dynatrace properties that are regularly updated. These regular updates used to impact performance because of frequent cache refreshes; this is now fixed with the updated integration.

Summary

The newly updated Dynatrace ServiceNow integration comes with a lot of enhancements, such as the host-to-host relationship import and the decommissioning of CIs. Several minor performance issues have also been fixed with this release.

The Dynatrace integration was certified for the ServiceNow New York release but it’s also available for the Madrid and London releases. In addition to these improvements, Dynatrace is one of the first vendors to fully leverage the New York release’s ability to create and update service maps from third-party monitoring tools.