Agent Client Collector Monitoring use case

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 3 minutes to read
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    Summary of Agent Client Collector Monitoring use case

    Agent Client Collector Monitoring (ACC-M) addresses the challenges enterprises face in monitoring hybrid IT environments that combine on-premises and cloud resources. It provides a unified, real-time view of IT service health by seamlessly integrating with the ServiceNow platform. This solution helps organizations overcome fragmented monitoring tools and improves operational visibility and responsiveness.

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    Key Features

    • Unified Monitoring: ACC-M collects health metrics, performance data, and alert statuses from on-premises servers, virtual machines, and cloud services using lightweight agents. Metrics include CPU, memory, network performance, and cloud service availability.
    • Converged Health Dashboard: Within ServiceNow, ACC-M delivers a single dashboard showing real-time health updates and service dependencies across the entire hybrid infrastructure, enabling proactive issue detection and resolution.
    • Hybrid Alerting and Automation: ACC-M generates enriched alerts specifying whether issues originate on-premises or in the cloud and triggers automated remediation workflows, reducing manual intervention and improving incident response speed.
    • Service Health Visualization: Using ServiceNow’s Service Map, ACC-M provides visual insights into service performance and dependencies, helping to identify risks and monitor service status at a glance.

    Key Outcomes

    • Improved Operational Efficiency: By consolidating monitoring into a single platform, ACC-M reduces complexity and frees IT staff to focus on strategic initiatives.
    • Faster Issue Resolution: Unified visibility and automated workflows shorten mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR), enabling quicker response to incidents.
    • Enhanced Business Continuity: Continuous, real-time monitoring across hybrid environments ensures critical services remain available, reducing downtime and supporting resilient IT operations.

    The Agent Client Collector Monitoring use case demonstrates how organizations can achieve unified monitoring across hybrid IT environments.

    Use case overview

    Many enterprises today operate in a hybrid IT environment, where some resources are hosted on-premises, while others reside in the cloud. This complexity often leads to fragmented monitoring, making it difficult to obtain a unified view of IT service health. Agent Client Collector Monitoring (ACC-M) bridges this gap by providing a comprehensive and converged picture of the organization's services, regardless of where they’re hosted. ACC-M is a lightweight monitoring solution that integrates seamlessly into its existing ServiceNow platform.

    Challenge

    An IT operations team struggled to cohesively monitor service health, due to the disparate nature of its infrastructure. On-premises resources, such as databases and ERP systems, were monitored using traditional methods, while cloud services had separate monitoring tools. This fragmentation resulted in:
    • A lack of real-time visibility into overall service health.
    • Delayed issue identification and troubleshooting.
    • Multiple monitoring dashboards, increasing complexity for the IT team.
    • Difficulty in correlating on-premises and cloud alerts, leading to inefficiencies.

    Solution

    ACC-M enables real-time, unified visibility across a hybrid IT environment. It improves operational efficiency, reduces downtime, and creates a more resilient IT infrastructure capable of supporting both on-premises and cloud-based services.

    ACC-M streamlines the monitoring of on-premises and cloud resources into a single, unified display by offering the following solutions:

    Table 1. Solutions implemented by ACC-M
    Solution Description Outcome
    Unified monitoring across environments
    ACC-M collects health metrics, performance data, and alert statuses from both on-premises and cloud infrastructure components. ACC-M uses lightweight agents installed on servers, VMs, and cloud resources to gather relevant data, providing:
    • CPU and memory utilization for on-premises servers.
    • Network performance metrics.
    • Availability and performance metrics for cloud services, such as databases and storage.

    Improved response:

    With a unified view of all resources, the IT operations team can quickly identify where issues are occurring and prioritize them based on overall service impact, reducing their mean-time-to-resolution (MTTR).
    Converged health view

    ACC-M provides the company’s IT team with a converged health dashboard within the ServiceNow platform, providing:

    • A unified view of both on-premises and cloud resources.
    • Real-time updates on service health, ensuring that hybrid services are monitored together and not in isolation.
    • Integrated insights into service dependencies, correlating incidents that impact both on-premises and cloud systems.

    Proactive monitoring and maintenance:

    ACC-M’s real-time health metrics enable proactive monitoring of services, avoiding outages by identifying and resolving issues before they escalate.
    Hybrid Alerting and Automation

    ACC-M enables setting up automated alerts for both on-premises and cloud environments, streamlining their incident response processes. When a service in the hybrid environment experiences an issue, ACC-M does the following:

    • Automatically generates alerts with enriched context, identifying whether the issue originated from the on-premises infrastructure or cloud services.
    • Triggers automated workflows for remediation based on the alert type, reducing manual intervention.

    Operational efficiency:

    The convergence of on-premises and cloud monitoring into a single platform eliminates the need for multiple monitoring tools. This reduces complexity and frees IT resources to focus on more strategic tasks.
    Service Health Visualization

    Using the ServiceNow Service Map enables visualizing how services are performing across the entire hybrid infrastructure. ACC-M feeds this with continuous, real-time data, helping the IT team do the following:

    • Track dependencies between on-premises and cloud services.
    • Identify potential points of failure before they impact the business.
    • See at a glance which services are healthy, degraded, or at risk, wherever they’re hosted.

    Enhanced Business Continuity:

    With a full view of the hybrid infrastructure health, IT can ensure that critical business services are up and running, improving overall business continuity.