IT Operations Management

Cloud Discovery and Cloud Provisioning and Governance need access to resources in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) service accounts. Learn about different methods of configuring such access.

If your organization deploys IT assets on the cloud, ITOM products must access your cloud environment to collect information about the IT infrastructure.

Activate integration allows you to enable a previously deactivated connector integration, restoring its functionality. This feature helps you seamlessly resume data flow and integration activities, ensuring continuity and efficient event management without the need to reconfigure the integration.

Activate the ITOM MCP Server Console to enable AI-driven alert management capabilities on your ServiceNow instance through Model Context Protocol (MCP) connectivity.

Enable on-call scheduling by incorporating the Alert table [em_alert] into the Trigger Rule Table Config list. This allows for creating shifts and implementing escalation triggers and policies, ensuring teams can promptly respond to alerts and maintain operational continuity.

The Agent Health dashboard provides visibility into the status and distribution of agents installed in your system. It allows you to quickly assess the number of deployed agents and their distribution, helping you prioritize your work more efficiently.

AI features across IT Operations Management help operators triage alerts, investigate incidents, automate service mapping, diagnose infrastructure, and generate resolution artifacts using generative AI and agentic workflows.

The AIOps Manager can create, configure, and manage an AI specialist. AI specialist is an AI-powered team member (not human) that works alongside your operators, handling routine alert triage so your people can focus on what requires human judgment.

The AIOps home page tracks operator activity and key metrics in real-time. It is available to all customers. Once your AI Specialist is active, additional metrics and capabilities unlock to help you measure impact, spot issues early, and report on AI performance over time.

The AIOps Supervisor home page helps supervisors review operational workload across selected assignment groups and monitor AIOps AI Specialist activity in Service Operations Workspace.

The AIOps 360 Overview dashboard offers a unified view of value and performance across IT operations, helping teams track efficiency, monitor alert handling, and assess automation outcomes. It enhances visibility into AIOps impact, supports informed decisions, and drives faster, smarter operations.

The AIOps dashboards offer comprehensive visualizations of critical operational data. You can monitor key performance indicators (KPIs), track service health, and gain valuable context on the overall IT environment. These dashboards provide actionable insights that facilitate proactive responses to potential issues.

Three scenarios show how teams typically use the AIOps AI Specialist to reduce noise, speed up investigations, and turn runbooks into fixes.

Synthetic Monitoring integrates with API Insights to enable proactive monitoring of discovered APIs.

Table that lists applications installed with the ServiceNow Otto for IT Operations Management (ITOM) application. When you update your application, any newly required application dependencies are installed.

Provides comprehensive information about an application service, including its name, business criticality, ownership, process and operational status, traffic-based discovery details, discovery status, and relevant comments. This enables thorough analysis of the application service's current state and usage, provides clarity on ownership and criticality, and aids in prioritizing resources and actions effectively.

To securely access data on your provider account, the Discovery process must present appropriate credentials. To make the credentials available to Discovery and Cloud Provisioning and Governance, you first create a user with programmatic access in the AWS Management Console. You then securely store the credentials in a service account at ServiceNow AI Platform.

I have reworked this topic to fit the new accessibility configuration structure. Per our discussion, please remove this topic from the CPG map and add a reference to the new access configuration anchor (./../discovery/concept/access-aws-accounts.dita) to the AWS Day 1 landing page. Configure policies with the necessary level of permissions to provide access to the AWS resources for Cloud Discovery and Cloud Provisioning and Governance.

Set up a trusted credential-less account that other AWS accounts can rely on for access.

Learn to fix issues that might occur when you create monitors in bulk.

View daily CI counts or the average of the last 90 daily counts.

View the list of configuration item (CI) types that require IT Operations Management subscription units.

If a request is throttled by a cloud provider during Discovery, Cloud Request Retry Configuration provides a customizable method to retry requests. Discovery and Service Mapping Patterns includes a retry configuration for AWS and Azure. You can customize the included configuration or create your own.

Several types of components are installed with activation of the ITOM/OT SU Licensing plugin, including tables and scheduled jobs.

Several types of components are installed with activation of the AIOps Experience [sn_sow_aiops] application, including user role and plugins.

Several types of components are installed with activation of the synthetic monitoring plugin, including tables and user roles.

Configure the MID Server to retrieve the temporary security credentials associated with an IAM role.

You can configure a MID Server with additional configuration parameters or create a new Mid Server property to alter any default behavior.

Choose live updates for alert lists to receive real-time updates, or disable live updates and refresh the alert list manually.

Configure the metrics you want to be visible for Service Operations Workspace alerts or use the metrics configured with the base system to focus on relevant data for faster troubleshooting.

Define which alerts your AI specialist receives by setting filter conditions—the AI specialist is only assigned alerts that match all active conditions.

An Azure Issue is a unified case that aggregates related alerts and signals from Azure Monitor into a single, trackable operational problem. It preserves investigation context and serves as a durable record for incident management, so you can resolve problems faster instead of tracking scattered alerts.

Configure OAuth-based integration between your Datadog instance and ServiceNow Event Management to securely ingest metric from the Datadog Instance. This setup enables authenticated metric delivery using client credentials, maps discovered server CIs, and allows anomaly alerts to create actionable events in ServiceNow through standard webhooks.

Configure metric pull connectors that require a script, connector definition, and connector instance to pull metrics from external sources. These connectors automate the data retrieval process, ensuring the seamless integration of external metrics into your system for efficient monitoring and performance analysis.

Configure the trusting account whose resources need to be accessed, to rely on the trusted account using the Identity and Access Management (IAM) role.

Configure access for AWS member accounts by using a trust chain from the accessor through the management account.

Configure observability agents for third-party application performance monitoring (APM) or network performance monitoring (NPM) vendors. These agents are used by the analyze alert impact agentic workflow and the AIOps AI specialist.

Gain the capability to efficiently manage and optimize ITOM subscriptions within the ServiceNow framework for streamlined operations.

Configure a metric pull connectors that require a script, connector definition, and connector instance to pull metrics from external sources. These connectors automate the data retrieval process, ensuring the seamless integration of external metrics into your system for efficient monitoring and performance analysis.

Configure Service Operations Workspace for ITOM so that you can manage IT alert volumes efficiently and customize the workspace to enhance service delivery and operational visibility.

Enable and configure the AI Specialist's capabilities by activating the Deflect, Investigate, and Remediate modules that control what the AI Specialist does when it receives an alert.

Plan and configure your implementation of synthetic monitoring.

Create AWS service accounts on the ServiceNow AI Platform to access your AWS account during AWS discovery.

Make visual styling changes to the sub-pages in the home page. This will enhance the overall user experience by providing a consistent and visually appealing interface, improving navigation, and ensuring that key information is easily accessible and engaging.

Create and customize a user view in the Service Operations Workspace to enable viewing information in the format you want.

A funnel visualization shows how data progresses through sequential stages, helping you identify drop-offs or bottlenecks at each step. Use it to track conversions, workflows, or process completion rates. You can add a funnel visualization to an existing dashboard or to a new dashboard.

Create Google Cloud Platform (GCP) service accounts on the ServiceNow AI Platform to access your GCP account during GCP discovery.

Customize lists in Service Operations Workspace by creating new lists, changing their order, modifying their content, or deleting lists as needed. This flexibility allows operators to organize information according to their specific requirements, facilitating easier navigation, quicker access to relevant data, and streamlined workflow management.

Create Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) service accounts on the ServiceNow AI Platform to access your Oracle account during Oracle discovery.

Create Oracle API credentials on the ServiceNow AI Platform to enable access to your Oracle resources during Oracle discovery.

Create a synthetic monitor to test the availability of APIs discovered through API Insights.

Create or edit a synthetic monitor to test the availability and performance of your HTTP endpoints before your users discover issues.

Create a synthetic monitoring location to run a synthetic monitor. If you plan to run monitors from a ServiceNow hosted location, you can skip this procedure.

Create synthetic monitors from incidents to proactively track endpoint failures and reduce repeat occurrences.

Authenticate your event custom connector as a data source to enable the pushing of event information to your ServiceNow instance. Define the custom connector by providing its details and mapping fields. This allows the extracted information from your custom connector's event messages to populate the required event fields. Finally, create and supply a URL for the custom connector webhook.

View the metrics for an alert and adjust the time range to see the trends for the alert or its associated Configuration Item (CI).

Customize the data displayed in the first-level cards in the Overview section. Configure parameters such as the header label, data source, metric, group by field, and viewAllQuery for a tailored display.

You can customize the data displayed in sub pages of the home page that is available in the base system. For any visual styling changes, you need to create a copy of that landing page and edit it.

ITOM/OT SU Licensing application counts CIs for ITOM applications and uses a daily average count for the last 90 days to produce license statistics for purchased subscription units.

Populate the Datadog advanced settings fields to define API paths, batching limits, host filters, sync duration, connection details, and debugging options. These values control how the pull connector retrieves and processes metrics and host data from Datadog, ensuring the connector runs with the desired scope and behavior.

Deactivate the AIOps specialist to pause all its operations. Your configuration is preserved and you can reactivate it at any time.

Deactivate integration allows you to temporarily disable an active connector integration without deleting it. This feature helps you manage integrations more effectively by pausing data flow when needed, reducing unnecessary event processing and improving system performance.

Delete integration allows you to permanently remove a connector integration from your system. This feature helps you maintain a clean and organized system by eliminating unused or obsolete integrations, freeing up resources and reducing potential clutter.

Delete a list to efficiently manage data sets, declutter your workspace, and maintain organized information.

Delete a Service Operations Workspace user view you no longer need. You perform this action from the Event Management menu, outside of Service Operations Workspace.

Domain separation is supported for synthetic monitoring. Domain separation enables you to separate data, processes, and administrative tasks into logical groupings called domains. You can control several aspects of this separation, including which users can see and access data.

Populate the pull connector advanced settings fields to optimize event retrieval and synchronization based on specific requirements such as connection preferences, event frequency, and time zone settings.

A scheduled job removes old Synthetic monitoring messages from the ECC queue. The job also flags stuck or orphaned messages with status as error, so that the queue doesn't grow indefinitely and stale entries aren't mistaken for pending work.

Grant the ECC Queue auto-purge job permission to remove old synthetic monitoring messages from the ECC queue.

The Event and Alert dashboard uses Performance Analytics to provide real-time visibility into events and alerts in Event Management, showcasing key trends, outcomes, and the most impacted configuration items. It highlights metrics such as noise reduction, alert grouping coverage, and top alert sources.

AI features in ITOM AIOps help operators triage alerts, investigate incidents, analyze service health, and improve service reliability using generative AI and agentic workflows.

Learn more about ServiceNow ITOM/OT SU Licensing, the different ITOM subscriptions it includes, and its benefit.

Overview of ITOM AIOps applications and capabilities that enable proactive IT operations management through AI-powered monitoring, analytics, and automation.

ServiceNow Otto for Setup provides a guided setup experience to install and configure IT Operations Management.

Learn how synthetic monitoring provides proactive, automated testing of service endpoints. By simulating user interactions, it can identify bugs, performance issues, and outages before they impact real users.

Create customized lists with fields tailored to your needs.

When you select an indicator data source for the funnel visualization, the following data configuration options are available.

When you select a table data source for the funnel visualization, the following data configuration options are available.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) access and permission using policies provide privileges for secure cloud resource utilization and management in GCP.

Forecast your licensing needs by comparing your current ITOM subscription unit usage against the predicted usage under 2026 Packaging SKUs.

Fill in the Google API Credentials form to configure the credentials.

The Health Log Analytics Operational dashboard uses Performance Analytics to monitor log data, alerts, and error rates in Service Operations Workspace.

Tests run by synthetic monitors enable service owners and operators to view service endpoint performance at scale.

Install two plugins to enable ITOM AIOps functionality: ITOM AIOps and ServiceNow Otto for ITOM.

Update the ServiceNow ITOM/OT SU Licensing [com.snc.itom.license] application to ensure you use the latest licensing functionality. Updating the application installs related ServiceNow Store applications and plugins if they are not already installed.

Install the ServiceNow Otto for IT Operations Management (ITOM) application.

You can install the AIOps Experience [sn_sow_aiops] application to get Service Operations Workspace for ITOM if you have the admin role.If the application does NOT include demo data or it does NOT install related applications and plugins, delete or revise the following sentence: The application includes demo data and installs related ServiceNow Store applications if they are not already installed.

You can install the synthetic monitoring application (com.snc.uib.sow_synthetics) with the admin role.

Populate the event fields to capture details such as event time, description, alert number, state, severity, metric name, node, message key, and error message.

The Integrations Launchpad showcases all Event Management connector integrations, allowing users to pull or push events from external or internal devices. This centralized hub simplifies Event Management by consolidating integration options in one place.

The ITOM AIOps configuration center is a centralized hub to manage AIOps settings. It helps you integrate monitoring tools, optimize alerts, metrics, and logs, manage services, dashboards, teams, and authorization—streamlining event-to-response workflows for better visibility, noise reduction, and operational efficiency.

Reference topics provide additional information about about using ITOM AIOps

Create Google API credentials to allow Cloud Discovery to access the data on your Google account securely.

Gain insights faster with data visualization in IT Operations Management (ITOM). Visualize metrics, logs, events, and alerts through intuitive dashboards and charts to identify trends, monitor performance, and resolve issues proactively.

Learn how IT administrators configure and optimize ITOM AIOps for enterprise environments. This use case demonstrates the setup journey for a multi-cloud financial services organization.

ITOM AIOps enables IT operations teams, site reliability engineers, and DevOps professionals to proactively monitor, analyze, and optimize the health and performance of their IT infrastructure and services.

ITOM AIOps helps you track and maintain the health of services in your organization. ITOM AIOps CSDM reference serves as a foundational blueprint for maintaining optimal IT operations by standardizing data models and processes. The main goal is to help you understand the two main capabilities that work together within the CSDM framework.

ITOM AIOps aligns with CSDM framework to ensure standardized data management and optimize IT operations.

ITOM AIOps relies on accurate data in CMDB tables to function as expected. Following CSDM guidelines when populating these tables improves the accuracy of service mapping and helps route alerts and incidents correctly.

The ServiceNow AI Platform uses a licensing method where your organization is billed for using the following IT Operations Management products: ServiceNow ITOM Visibility, ServiceNow ITOM Discovery, ServiceNow ITOM AIOps, ServiceNow Health Log Analytics, ServiceNow ITOM Optimization, ServiceNow ITOM Cloud Accelerate, ServiceNow Service Reliability Management, ServiceNowSLO Management, ServiceNow Service Observability, and ServiceNow synthetic monitoring.

You can purchase subscriptions for individual ITOM applications (a la carte) or as a bundle covering multiple ITOM applications.

You can purchase subscriptions for several ITOM products together as part of a bundle.

Generate a list of currently countable CIs for each of the ITOM applications: ITOM Visibility, Discovery, ITOM AIOps, Health Log Analytics, ITOM Cloud Accelerate, and ITOM Optimization.

Use the ITOM Licensing dashboard to review the statistics of the resource consumption and status against your purchased subscriptions. This dashboard contains reports for each ITOM application. The reports offer visualization of the daily usage count and of the average consumption of subscription units for 90 days.

You can purchase subscriptions for individual ITOM applications (ala carte).

Purchase licensing subscriptions for ITOM products individually (a la carte), bundle several products together, or opt for both individual and bundled subscriptions.

Manage alerts through an AI agent or MCP Client. The Alert Actions tool lets the agent or client act on alerts directly.

Investigate alerts using the ITOM MCP Server Console with an MCP Client application.

Get remediation suggestions for an alert from an AI agent or MCP Client, matching what's available in Service Operations Workspace.

Use the Alert Actions tool in an MCP Client to assign, close, reopen, or acknowledge multiple related alerts as a group in a single request.

Use an AI-enabled MCP Client that is connected to your ServiceNow environment through the ITOM MCP Server Console to review configuration item (CI) reliability and topology. In addition, the MCP Client can assess incident impact on reliability and create service level objectives (SLOs).

Create, configure, and activate MID-less log ingestion integrations for Health Log Analytics from an MCP Client.

Set up MID-less log ingestion integrations for Health Log Analytics (HLA) directly from an AI-enabled MCP Client, without opening the ServiceNow UI.

Get and execute an alert remediation workflow or suggestion through an MCP Client.

Use the Alert Actions tool in an MCP Client to perform single-alert operations. For example, to assign, close, reopen, acknowledge, or annotate one alert at a time.

The IT Operations Management (ITOM) Optimization application provides automation for the cloud workflows used to manage the cloud resources throughout their life cycle. It enables certified and enterprise-compliant cloud deployment, cost visibility, and other cloud management processes.

Reference topics provide additional information for configuring and using ITOM Optimization .

ServiceNow IT Operations Management (ITOM) licensing calculates and displays the usage of ITOM subscriptions based on subscription units.

Reference topics provide additional information about scheduled jobs, tables, subscriptions form and dashboard that you use to configure and administer ITOM/OT SU Licensing.

Description of the fields on the Subscriptions form for the ITOM products.

Description of the fields on the License Report form.

Edit or delete synthetic monitors after creating them.

Use the AIOps home page to view and manage the alerts assigned to the AIOps AI Specialist. This page is the default home page of the Service Operations Workspace. Which view you see depends on your role.

Define how metrics are displayed within Service Operations Workspace.

Install and configure the MID Servers correctly to enable ITOM products to access to the cloud resources.

You can configure the MID Server for Cloud Provisioning and Governance to use a proxy server. Using a proxy server supports all cloud-based activities such as running Discovery, billing downloads, provisioning virtual machines, and running life-cycle operations on virtual machines.

Customize the header message that is a part of the greeting text on the home page. This creates a personalized user experience and sets the right tone for the information presented.

Read the following to understand how to use the Details page of a synthetic monitor to view the results of its tests.

A single HTTP endpoint or discovered API is tagged to more than one application service so every team that depends on it is notified when it fails.

Follow a typical NOC operator through their daily workflow using ITOM AIOps capabilities to transform reactive operations into proactive, intelligent IT management.

Set up, manage, and optimize your generative‑AI solutions on the ServiceNow AI Platform from a single workspace.

Learn about the ITOM AI specialists and the workflows they support.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) access and permission using policies provide privileges for secure cloud resource utilization and management in OCI.

Add the AIOps specialist to your team so it can start receiving and acting on alerts by assigning it a name, a role, and one or more teams.

ITOM Service Operations Workspace supports creating and managing your on-call shifts and schedules. On-call schedule determines who is on-call at a given time. Learn how to configure on-call calendars and escalation policies to ensure timely responses to critical issues, reducing downtime and maintaining service continuity. Streamlining these processes enhances team readiness, minimizes disruptions, and improves service reliability.

Access your Configurable Workspace experience in UI Builder for editing.

The ServiceNow platform uses Operational Technology Management (OTM) to manage licenses for the manufacturing industry. OTM contains the licenses that are included in IT Operations Management, as well as licenses unique to OTM.

The parameters to be configured when sending data to other systems using an outbound webhook.

Tables that list the plugins or applications that are installed with ITOM AIOps applications. When you update your application, any newly required application dependencies are installed.

Table that lists the plugins that are activated with the ITOM Optimization application Cloud Provisioning and Governance. When you update your application, any newly required application dependencies are installed.

Populate the pull connector advanced settings fields to optimize event retrieval and synchronization based on specific requirements such as connection preferences, event frequency, and time zone settings.

Configure event pull connectors that require a script, connector definition, and connector instance to pull events from external devices. These connectors automate the data retrieval process, ensuring the seamless integration of external events into your system for efficient monitoring and management.

Integrate with an event push connector to connect to an external event source and push event information to your ServiceNow instance.

Get better visibility into your infrastructure and services, prevent service outages, and expand your organization's operational agility with ServiceNow IT Operations Management.

Enable quick task prioritization by directing agents to the homepage immediately upon logging into the ServiceNow instance. This improves workflow efficiency by granting agents immediate access to essential tools and information, facilitating the timely resolution of critical tasks and issues.

Read the following to understand what is displayed on the Synthetic monitoring landing page where you can view aggregate information about your synthetic monitors.

Rename a list to better reflect its content or purpose. This customization allows operators to align list names with their workflow terminology, improving clarity and usability.

Reorder lists to prioritize information and enhance workflow organization.

Use the ITOM MCP Server Console to investigate alerts through an MCP Client application, such as Moveworks or AWS Claude.

Use an MCP Client with the ITOM MCP Server Console to review configuration item (CI) reliability and topology, assess incident impact on reliability, and create service level objectives (SLOs).

Review your events to ensure alerts are created as intended. Start this process by checking the health status of your integration. This provides useful statistics to highlight where you can make improvements. You can enrich alerts with relevant business context, group them for better noise reduction, escalate critical alerts promptly, and notify your team for swift response and resolution.

Review alerts, incidents, and AIOps AI Specialist activity across selected assignment groups on the AIOps Supervisor home page in Service Operations Workspace.

Explore the interface to understand how an operator can prioritize tasks and offer solutions.

Create and configure cloud service accounts at ServiceNow AI Platform for the corresponding Google Cloud Platform (GCP) service accounts.

Create and configure cloud service accounts at ServiceNow AI Platform for the corresponding Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) service accounts.

Create and configure cloud service accounts at ServiceNow AI Platform for the corresponding Amazon Web Services (AWS) service accounts.

Create and configure cloud service accounts at ServiceNow AI Platform for the corresponding Microsoft Azure accounts.

Create and configure ServiceNow cloud accounts at ServiceNow AI Platform for the corresponding Cloud vendor service accounts.

Access your Configurable Workspace experience in UI Builder for editing.

ServiceNow Service Operations Workspace (SOW) is a configurable workspace designed to streamline IT Operations Management (ITOM) workflows, offering a unified experience for multiple IT operational processes. Configurable and user-friendly, it consolidates various tasks into a single interface, allowing seamless navigation and easy access to tools and information.

Learn what each synthetic monitor test status means, so you can distinguish a genuine endpoint failure from a test that never ran.

The ServiceNowsynthetic monitoring application empowers organizations to proactively manage and enhance the performance and availability of critical services. By simulating user transactions on API endpoints, this solution identifies performance bottlenecks, helps ensure up-time, and optimizes user experiences.

Reference topics provide additional information about the synthetic monitoring application, such as components installed and page details.

Synthetic monitoring includes the following properties.

Task modules are the AI Specialist's built-in capabilities. Each module handles a distinct part of the alert lifecycle, and you control which modules are active and how they behave.

Run the AI Specialist with a real alert to preview its output before it goes live as an active member of your NOC team.

If the ECC queue keeps growing or contains large numbers of stale synthetic monitoring messages, use this information to identify why the auto-purge job isn't clearing them.

Learn how to fix OAuth token refresh issues.

When a test fails for a monitor and you have configured an alert to trigger, the alert record should show the impacted service. There are a few reasons why this field might not be populated.

What to do when monitors don't work after upgrading synthetic monitoring.

Read these topics to understand how to fix common issues in synthetic monitoring.

Connect an AI-enabled MCP Client application to your ServiceNow environment using the ITOM MCP Server Console. Use the MCP Client to investigate alerts, review configuration item (CI) reliability, assess incident impact, and create service level objectives (SLOs).

Ensure optimal utilization of your organization's ITOM subscriptions by analyzing the resource usage of your ITOM products.

The AIOps Value Realization dashboard uses Performance Analytics to offer comprehensive visibility into the business outcomes of alerts, events, and incidents. It features metrics such as noise reduction (events to alerts compression), average MTTR for incidents created by Event Management[var.event-mgmt], and the most critical services impacted by hours.

View the results of tests run by a monitor, along with configuration details, and related configuration items (CIs).

View information about all your synthetic monitors.

View all the current active alerts for your monitors.

Visualize relationships between Configuration Items (CIs) and alerts with real-time updates and detailed impact paths. Enhance troubleshooting and proactive management by quickly identifying root causes and dependencies for both discovered services and application services.

View how many subscriptions for IT Operations Management applications your organization purchased and consumed.

View the health and performance of an alert's CI using Metric Explorer, to help troubleshoot problematic areas in the CI.

View the primary alerts associated with a service to help troubleshoot issues with the service.

Review statistics for the resources that can be managed by ITOM products. Compare this data to the average number of allocated subscription units.

View the results of an individual synthetic test run by a monitor.

The Service Operations Workspace monitors services within your Event Management environment, enabling you to review their status and identify those at risk of suboptimal performance. This empowers you to promptly address any issues.

Monitor the health of services and filter the information that you want to view, allowing you to focus on the most relevant data and make informed decisions quickly.

View comprehensive information about an application service, including its name, business criticality, ownership, process and operational status, traffic-based discovery details, discovery status, and relevant comments. This enables thorough analysis of the application service's current state and usage, provides clarity on ownership and criticality, and facilitates effective prioritization of resources and actions.