SAM Healthcheck and Assessment Services
Service Offering Description
The SAM Health Check Service Offering consists of a series of workshops and working sessions, performed either remotely or on-site (for an additional fee), in which the customer’s existing ITAM product implementations and supporting technology (e.g. CMDB, Discovery, ITAM workflows) is assessed so that a plan is documented detailing all of the actions required for customers to use ServiceNow SAM in an optimal fashion.
Problem Statements
ServiceNow SAM has not been implemented properly – the module was installed and then configured in a less-than-ideal way, which means that it is not working optimally. For example, if you're collecting data from virtual servers but haven't set up the VMware or Oracle discovery patterns correctly, only getting half the SAM picture is available, which is essentially useless.
ServiceNow SAM is not maintained regularly – new contracts and purchase orders are being processed and are not represented in ServiceNow SAM. Asset on/off boarding and software request processes need to be uplifted
CMDB is not optimized for Software Asset Management – An IT infrastructure won't stay the same, and ServiceNow SAM needs to keep up. If a new cluster or cloud service is deployed and Discovery isn’t activated then sight is lost of that part of the infrastructure, meaning license compliance cannot be calculated.
Integrations for ServiceNow SAM have not been configured correctly – integrations for SaaS vendors and key publishers such as IBM and SAP have not been configured correctly or need configuring so that license and usage data can be populated in ServiceNow SAM.
Overview
Asset Sense’s ServiceNow Software Asset Management (SAM) health check service offering is a service to analyse implementations of ServiceNow SAM which customers have deployed since the product was released in July 2017. The service includes the following:
- Review the current state of the ServiceNow SAM implementation with customer stakeholders and identify pain points.
- Review the quality of the CI records and software installation data in the ServiceNow CMDB to ensure trustworthy software installation/consumption data is being discovered.
- Review discovery/inventory sources to ensure 95% coverage of the customer’s IT environment
- Review software models, license entitlements and contract records in ServiceNow SAM
- Analyse ITAM-related processes and enabled workflows in ServiceNow and recommend best practice enhancements.
The outcome of the assessment is a list of recommendations and improvements which require acting upon so that customers can extract maximum value for their ServiceNow SAM license investment by making sure the tool is fully deployed and operational and is accurately discovering 95% of the customer’s environment. This list should inform a business case to secure the necessary budgets for the recommended improvements.
