Change risk integration for Infrastructure Automation

You can enable an integration for Infrastructure Automation to gain the advantage of change risk assessments. With this integration, your IT operators can use data from ServiceNow to assess the risk of a code deployment based on prior incidents, estimate the chances of a successful update, identify risks, build logs, apply security policies and more.

The Change Risk module ingests un-structured data from ServiceNow, and analyzes the data to look for similar tickets and to understand how incidents and failures might have occurred. The module can then provide an assessment of the overall risk of suggested changes. With an integration with ServiceNow for change risk, Infrastructure Automation allows for the automation of the delivery of infrastructure services which integrates with ServiceNow. Since Infrastructure Automation is an end-to-end infrastructure provisioning and management capability, Infrastructure Automation can complete ongoing checks against configurations after infrastructure is provisioned to ensure systems are running as prescribed and adhere to system-wide compliance policies. Through the integration, updates can be made to the ServiceNow CMDB or to create change requests.

With the integration in place, the following flow demonstrates the possible interactions between Infrastructure Automation and the Change Risk components of IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps and ServiceNow:

Scenario: A change is proposed to add additional disk space to a virtual machine.

Interaction Flow:

  1. The Operator invokes a day-2 operation in Infrastructure Automation to change the server configuration to create and attach the new disk.
  2. The day-2 operation creates a Change Request ticket in ServiceNow, populating it with details on the requested change (virtual machine ID, new disk size, and more).
  3. The Change Risk component monitors the ServiceNow tickets. Using a pre-trained model to analyzing similar tickets, IBM Cloud Pak for AIOps can classify the change as a high or low risk change and add a confidence level of the prediction onto the ServiceNow ticket.
  4. The ServiceNow operator approves the change request based on the confidence level, and marks it ready for implementation.
  5. The day-2 operation in Infrastructure Automation waits for the ServiceNow Change Request to be approved before proceeding.
  6. After observing the change in the state of the ServiceNow Change Request, Infrastructure Automation carries out the provisioning change to add the disk to the virtual machine.
  7. After completing the provisioning action, Infrastructure Automation updates the ServiceNow Change Request to mark it as complete. The request can be reviewed and closed by a ServiceNow operator.
  8. Infrastructure Automation policies are applied against the configuration and alerts are raised if server configuration isn't in compliance. Both server VM parameters as well as application middleware packages can be checked for compliance against defined policies.

For more information abouth the steps to configure the AI algorithm to determine change risk, see Configuring change risk.