Automate Your Rightsizing Workflows with IBM Cloudability and ServiceNow

In our continued commitment to driving cloud cost efficiency, Apptio is proud to launch the latest innovation in FinOps empowerment: an end-to-end integration between ServiceNow and IBM Cloudability’s policy-driven rightsizing. Building on the robust foundations of our existing Jira integration, we’ve extended these capabilities to support the leading enterprise ITSM solution, enabling more organizations to significantly reduce cloud waste by automating business workflows.

Focused on solving the number one FinOps challenge

There is one thing that has remained constant for the FinOps community in recent times – the number one challenge has continued to be “getting engineers to act on cost optimization”. Practitioners have confirmed this in both the 2022 and 2023 State of FinOps reports. Solving this has grown in importance as cloud footprints grow industry-wide and economic uncertainty puts pressure on bottom lines. At the heart of this challenge is that you are charged for each cloud resource you provision, regardless of how well-utilized they are or if they are utilized at all.

Why is usage optimization so difficult to execute?

Organizations find it challenging to provision and decommission resources as part of a cost-efficient cloud, but why? There are many reasons – the innumerous instance types and settings to choose from, the effort required to collect utilization data, unpredictable shifts in workload demand, and the sheer scale of cloud itself. The Apptio team has worked hard to deliver an interactive rightsizing tool that solves these challenges. Still, some teams have struggled to execute these recommended actions as they attempt to prioritize them against other work tasks and face resistance from engineers needing to learn another tool. With this launch, we’ve made it much easier to follow through on these recommendations. 

Automate key workflows with ServiceNow

Our solution solves this workflow problem by integrating Cloudability’s leading rightsizing engine with the leading ITSM tool, ServiceNow. ServiceNow is a widely adopted tool that organizations and millions of practitioners use daily, helping ensure the right things are done by the right people at the right time. This is why it made perfect sense for Apptio to partner with ServiceNow, establishing a joint approach to managing the work and business of IT. This out-of-the-box integration gives our customers the flexibility to create ServiceNow requests or incidents automatically based on policies that make sense for them.

Crucially, these policies can be configured to only trigger requests when the projected savings exceed a specific threshold. Each policy can be tied to a particular Cloudability view – representing entities such as teams, departments, and business units – and set applicable values for ServiceNow custom fields.

Track status changes and surface ROI

With requests or incidents now being created automatically in ServiceNow for high-value rightsizing opportunities, it’s straightforward to prioritize these tasks against all other tasks in the backlog. The assigned engineer can retrieve pertinent information directly within ServiceNow, including the recommended action and projected savings. The engineer can then choose to follow through with the recommendation, take an alternative cost-saving action, or intentionally choose not to proceed at all (there may be a valid reason that can be captured in the request itself). This should be done using the organization’s approved processes, following infrastructure as code and CI/CD best practices where applicable. As the request or incident status is updated, this information flows through to Cloudability itself.

All the requests created by the policy engine are summarized within Cloudability’s Rightsizing ROI feature. Here, the user can scan through all the requests, identify which ones are open and closed, and determine whether an action has been taken or not. One of the most powerful aspects of this feature is it surfaces the realized savings from these actions, both at the individual resource and aggregate level, providing feedback to the teams on their impact.

Get started today

This new integration is available to all Cloudability customers who use ServiceNow. A Cloudability admin simply adds your ServiceNow credentials to Cloudability and creates the rightsizing policies with the settings and schedule that suits your organization. From there you’ll be well on your way to solving FinOps’ number one challenge, with engineers and FinOps practitioners managing cost optimization from the business workflow tool they use every day.

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