Implementation priorities
Implementation priorities for service management include incorporating or establishing policies and procedures to account for cloud services. It is a best practice to involve your operations teams early in a preparation phase before migrating production workloads using iterative production readiness criteria and checklists. Use of ITSM tools and integration with AWS services can be accomplished in an iterative manner. For example, initially tooling and integration can be implemented manually and progressing to full automation in later phases. The M&G Guide recommends that you implement service management framework processes in a phased approach that establishes a cloud operational baseline and connects with your system of record declared ITSM tools.
Integrate provisioning processes with the ITSM tool suite
Infrastructure as code templates are the cornerstone of distribution, but also enable full service management. Integrating your provisioning and distribution processes with your ITSM tool suite is an essential step. Prioritize common requests for self-service in your ITSM tool. When creating a service template naming convention across your accounts and workloads, establish a lifecycle management process using approvals and standard workflow processes. Build templates with operational metadata (tags) and parameters to be populated in alignment with the configuration management system. Sensitive data should not be used for tag keys or values. Ensure that template access is enforced across both distribution and ITSM tooling permissions.
Enable event, incident, and problem management across your environment
Enable an issue management mechanism such as ticketing across your AWS accounts. Integrate event management with other ITSM processes, such as incident and change management. Identify service owners, dependencies, and third-party integrations required to scale effectively with updated event store and sourcing patterns. Extend existing roles, procedures, and governance activities to accommodate cloud scale. This extension includes: incident and problem management roles and responsibilities, support escalation paths, and standard operating procedures. Establish remediation runbooks for common issue patterns to improve mean time to repair. Use game-day scenarios to validate support procedures. Analyze service trends to help provide recommendations and improve designs of your applications, resources, and environments on AWS.
Identify accounts, environments, and resources that require asset tracking
Identify the accounts, environments, and resources that require asset tracking for compliance. Update registration in the CMDB as part of the account and asset provisioning and decommissioning processes. Track standards (regulatory, enterprise, security, financial, etc.) and compliance of required resources within AWS by creating integrations to your ITSM tooling that will enable a federated view of your AWS services and resources.
Align change request procedures and policies for rapid cloud deployment
Align or create change request types in your policies and procedures that allow rapid deployment of resources. Determine which service templates (infrastructure as code) can be deemed as pre-approved changes. Determine how continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines will be accounted for in your change procedures. Align service and resource change requests through your ITSM tools.
Connect your ITSM system of record tooling to AWS
Implementing AWS Service Management Connectors is composed of three key steps: configuring AWS native services, configuring ITSM tooling, and validating your configuration and connectivity.
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Configuring AWS management and governance services
AWS Service Management Connectors enable integration features for Service Catalog, AWS Config, AWS Systems Manager Automation, AWS Systems Manager OpsCenter, and AWS Security Hub. AWS Service Management Connectors requires baseline configurations and permissions to these services. For more information on these specific requirements, refer to the following documentation:
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Configuring ITSM Tool
AWS Service Management Connectors enable integration for ServiceNow and Atlassian Jira Service Management. The connector requires you to download the Connector plugin (scoped app) from the respective ITSM tool platform. For more information on these specific requirements, refer to the:
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Validating configurations
Once the AWS and ITSM Tooling configurations are complete, the final step is to validate that AWS and the respective ITSM tool connected successful and the intended service management actions are enabled. For more information on these validation actions, refer to the public documentation for the desired ITSM tool.
