June 26, 2025
Managing IT operations often means dealing with hundreds and thousands of alerts everyday. These alerts can be hard to understand and take time to resolve. That’s where Now Assist for ITOM (IT Operations Management) comes in.
With the help of generative AI, Now Assist makes it easier to understand, investigate, and resolve alerts—quickly and intelligently.
What is Now Assist for ITOM?
Now Assist for IT Operations Management (ITOM) uses generative AI to provide alert analyses within the Event Management module of ServiceNow. At its core, it enhances the alert triage process—helping IT teams quickly understand, assess, and act on incoming alerts.
Key Skills
Now Assist includes two AI-powered skills to help IT teams:
1. Alert Analysis: Making Alerts Human-Friendly
In traditional event management, alerts often come with technical data that’s hard to read.
Alert Analysis solves this by using AI to turn raw alert data into clear, human-readable
summaries.
Behind the Scenes:
• Analyzes incoming alerts.
• Uses past incidents and system context.
• Creates an easy-to-understand explanation of the alert.
How it helps:
Instead of guessing, your team is guided by AI. For example:
“This alert is similar to previous incidents caused by the sync Data batch job. Consider checking the schedule or memory usage during that time.”
It’s like having a virtual assistant helping your team with their daily alert triage.
2. Alert Investigation: Digging Deeper with AI
After understanding an alert, the next step is to figure out why it’s happening and what to
do about it. That’s where Alert Investigation comes in.
Behind the Scenes:
• Investigates the root cause of the alert.
• Suggests likely triggers based on system behavior and alert history.
• Recommends next steps or checks to perform.
How it helps:
Instead of guessing, your team is guided by AI. For example:
“This alert is similar to previous incidents caused by the syncData batch job. Consider
checking the schedule or memory usage during that time.”
It’s like having a virtual assistant helping your team with their daily alert triage.
What Do we Need to Use It?
To use Now Assist for ITOM, you need a few things set up in your ServiceNow instance:
• Event Management: This collects and processes alerts from your systems.
• Service Operations Workspace: Where the alerts are displayed and managed.
• Now Assist & Generative AI Plugin: These enable the AI-powered features.
Required Plug-ins:
1. Event Management (com.snc.event_mgmt) – This is the core plugin for managing alerts in ServiceNow.
2. Machine Learning (com.snc.ml) – Required to enable AI-based capabilities.
3. Now Assist for ITOM (com.sn_itom.now_assist) – This is the main plugin that brings the generative AI features to ITOM.
Required Roles:
• event_management_user – Basic access to Event Management.
• event_management_admin – To configure and manage alert rules and services.
• ml_admin – To work with Machine Learning models (if customization is needed).
• now_assist_user – Access to Now Assist features in ITOM.
Working Module
Here’s a basic step-by-step process of how Now Assist helps in event management:
1. An alert is created – e.g., CPU usage is very high on a server.
2. Now Assist reviews the alert, looks at current system data, and checks similar past incidents.
3. It creates a summary using AI, like: “CPU usage on Server A is high. This usually happens when the daily backup runs at 10 PM.”
4. You act based on the AI’s suggestion or confirm its recommendation.
All this takes just seconds, instead of minutes or hours of manual checking.
Real-World Example
Imagine it’s Monday morning. Your system shows 100 alerts. One alert says a database server has high memory usage. Without Now Assist:
• You check logs.
• Look at CPU graphs.
• Check for past tickets.
• Manually investigate—this might take 30 minutes or more.
With Now Assist:
“High memory usage detected on DB Server. Similar alert happened last week due to nightly
data sync job. No impact recorded previously.”
Result:
You instantly know it’s a known, non-critical issue—and move on to more urgent tasks
Key Benefits
| Fast Resolution | Get answers in seconds instead of minutes or hours |
| Fewer Mistakes | Clear summaries reduce guesswork |
| Reduced Alert Noise | Only focus on important alerts |
| Better Collaboration | Human-readable alerts are easy to share with your team |
| Smarter Decisions | AI suggests likely causes and possible solutions |
