Syncsort Expands IBM i Integration with ServiceNow
October 16, 2019 Alex Woodie
IBM i shops that want to take full advantage of cloud-based IT management services may be interested in hearing about a new offering unveiled by Syncsort last week. With the new release of its Ironstream for ServiceNow product, Syncsort is making it easier for companies to push IBM i and mainframe event data into ServiceNow Event Management.
ServiceNow is barely five years old, but the company has already made a big mark in the burgeoning fields of IT service management and AIOps. With $2.6 billion in revenue and more than, 5,000 software as a service (SaaS) subscribers, the publicly traded firm (NYSE: NOW) helps companies manage their increasingly complex IT systems and workflows.
Syncsort has previously supported ServiceNow with its Ironstream offering, which was originally created to move mainframe data into NoSQL-based environments, where it could be used for operational and security analytics. As such, Ironstream played a key role in Syncsort’s “Big Iron to Big Data” plans.
The company, which acquired Vision Solutions in 2017, developed versions of Ironstream specifically for Elastic and Splunk, and over time it expanded it to other products, including ServiceNow, Micro Focus‘ Universal Configuration Management Database (UCMDB), and Microsoft‘s System Center Operations Manager (SCOM).
Syncsort originally based its Ironstream for IBM i product on Cilasoft and MIMIX technology, which helped move log data from IBM i into Elastic and Splunk environments, as well as security information and event management (SIEM) products from QRadar, Symantec, and others. Following its acquisition of the EView software, Syncsort shifted gears and decided to base its Ironstream for IBM i software on that technology.
ServiceNow has been in the Ironstream mix for a while now, but support has been relegated to supporting ServiceNow Discovery. That service is designed to find applications and devices on customer networks and then update the CMDB with the information it finds.
That basic discovery capability is useful, but Syncsort is going far beyond it with the latest update, in which it has expanded support for ServiceNow Event Management, another capability within the ServiceNow offering.
According to ServiceNow, the Event Management offering helps to “reduce event noise generated by monitoring tools by using predictive intelligence, such as machine learning techniques, to correlate events and produce actionable alerts and incidents.”
The offering provides root cause analysis and can be used to reduce mean time to repair (MTTR), the company says. It also comes with a nifty Event Management Dashboard, which gives customers “a single pane of glass” to view business service health and group alerts, it says.
IBM i and mainframe shops have been “severely underserved” when it comes to utilizing ServiceNow’s offerings, says David Hodgson, Chief Product Officer at Syncsort.
“ServiceNow helps IT to improve service availability by providing a single view of data across the IT infrastructure through its unified cloud platform,” Hodgson tells IT Jungle via email. “Unfortunately, mainframes and IBM i systems, which are critical to many business services, have been left out because there wasn’t an automated way to connect them to the ServiceNow platform, resulting in siloed views and manual processes that can lead to service failures.”
If things go as planned for Syncsort, the new Ironstream offering will help to reverse that trend and bring IBM i and mainframe systems within the purview of ServiceNow’s breadth of IT management services.
Hodgson continues: “Now, Syncsort is extending Ironstream to easily integrate data from these business critical systems into ServiceNow Event Management, empowering IT to dramatically reduce the time and effort required to correlate events, automate problem resolution and safeguard against service interruptions.”
For more information, you can view a recorded webinar on the topic at Syncsort’s website.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated. Syncsort’s Ironstream for IBM i software is now based on EView technology, not MIMIX and Cilasoft technology.
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