How AI and automation help reduce manual workloads in ITSM

Information technology service management (ITSM) is how most IT organizations manage everything from simple troubleshooting to complex deployments. Now AI and automation play a big part in ITSM. They help teams do more work faster, enrich support tickets with useful information, and reduce errors.

What can AI and automation do that your IT team can’t? Sometimes it’s not the content of the work itself that bogs things down; it’s the effort to manage the work that does. Using automation with AI helps simplify clunky processes and keep ticketing rolling smoothly.

One approach to apply AI and automation to ITSM is to integrate Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform and Red Hat AI with a ticketing system, such as ServiceNow. These suites of tools can work together to reduce the onus of manual ticket creation for your operations processes while reporting more detailed information. 

Every ITSM organization is unique, but broadly they’re similar. Employees or customers manually open support tickets, then the IT team responds, logs information, and closes the ticket with a resolution. In a perfect world, every ticket would match a strict template. In reality, most tickets end up with missing fields, different notations, and entries that vary from person to person.

Getting through the work can be tedious and leave a messy ticket database to clean up later. Some tickets might remain open because they were never fully addressed. Others might be resolved but never followed up on. Still others might be forgotten for 1 reason or another. These issues of ticket volume and human error can overwhelm IT teams.

When it’s time to audit your team’s work, find the root causes of issues, and analyze what went wrong, the job is far more difficult when information isn’t consistent from 1 entry to the next. This is exactly the kind of problem automation and AI can solve.

Not all tickets are the same, and each case requires a different level of work. That’s why ticket creation and incident research are so important. Doing those processes right means you’ll be able to properly prioritize and assign tickets, and save time later.

This is where event-driven automation can work well. Event-driven automation is the process of automatically responding to changes in an IT environment in a way that helps resolve issues faster or reduce the time needed for more repetitive tasks. When it comes to tickets specifically, event-driven automation can connect the dots between different systems, errors, and requests. Incident reports are then more robust, providing a fuller picture for those working the issues.

AI assistance can further enhance your IT team’s tickets. Imagine your IT operations group getting an influx of event-automated tickets detailing a network outage. Of course your team will work to restore the network as fast as possible. But what if there’s not enough information to work from?

AI can make informed remediation suggestions. For example, Red Hat AI tools can integrate with popular observability platforms such as Splunk, Dynatrace, and LogicMonitor to turn simple observations into a plan of action. 

Learn how to automate your ServiceNow ITSM and other IT systems with Ansible Automation Platform. Video duration: 10:54.

One example of using event-driven automation for ticketing is the certified collection for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and ServiceNow. With this combination, you can insert premade templates and playbooks that run automation workflows to create tickets. 

Automated ticketing

Playbooks can help during something like a massive enterprise upgrade or an application deployment. As your internal team deploys an enterprise-wide update, newly created tickets will automatically account for the next steps of the process. Then they’ll close automatically when they’re finished. Opening and closing tickets without the need for manual input keeps the wider team (and any collaborators) aware of their progress, while saving the time it would’ve taken your IT team to do so themselves.

As soon as 1 part of the process is complete and the ticket is resolved, event-driven automation can alert the team handling the next steps to start their tasks. Automation also keeps all relevant work within your organization’s governance. Your tickets become the single source of truth, avoiding confusion from extra chat messages, emails, or other notifications made outside of ServiceNow.

Multisystem information reporting

In the case of, say, a network drop, Ansible Automation Platform can query multiple domains within your organization and gather information to add more supportive details to service tickets. It can look into your observability data, compile filtered reports of when the issue occurred into the ServiceNow ticket, and kick off an Ansible Playbook designed to troubleshoot the error. With the network restored, your administrators have a full picture of the incident so they can identify a root cause for more thorough remediation later, with less sleuthing required. 

AI-powered remediation insights

The 1st time the problem occurs, AI can scrutinize information from linked observability tools and query an in-house large language model (LLM) to pull key insights as to the nature of the error. Findings are funneled back into ServiceNow, giving IT operations much more context and a potential starting point for remediation. If the network outage is a recurring issue, then these AI recommendations can include historical data to suggest more event-automated remediation solutions or proactive plans to keep the network stabilized.

To set up your IT teams for success, give them as many resources as possible so they can quickly address solutions. A key way to help is by enriching their tickets with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and Red Hat AI.

Ansible Automation Platform is a comprehensive IT enterprise automation solution that includes Event-Driven Ansible. This feature allows your IT teams to determine the appropriate response to an event and execute automated actions to address them.

In addition, the Red Hat Ansible Certified Content Collection for ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) adds the ability to create optimized workflows for ServiceNow. This makes it even faster to connect your tools to ServiceNow and stand up an automated process for your IT teams to save time and work with accuracy. 

Find out more about certified content for ServiceNow