Uplifting Dynatrace & ServiceNow Integration at a Leading Australian Payments Company
Case Study
About Our Client
Overview
Our client is a leading Australian payments company. In 2022 they amalgamated with three other entities. The organisation runs core payment infrastructure and customer payment experiences across the country, handling billions of transactions each year.
The merger aimed to deliver public benefits by coordinating investment, avoiding duplication, and enabling faster, more effective delivery of payment innovations. However, the integration of three distinct organisations brought operational complexity – particularly in governance, tooling, and service management.
To realise its ambition of becoming a more agile and innovative competitor to global card networks and Big Tech, the organisation needed to unify and streamline its processes, tools, and teams.
Services
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- Integration Enhancement
- Discovery & Consulting
- Governance & Clean-Up
- Automation Implementation
- Strategic Roadmapping
Sector
Financial Services
The Challenge: siloed operational complexity & disconnected tooling
Despite previous modernisation efforts, the organisation grappled with siloed operations, disparate development teams, and inconsistent standards across incident and service management. These challenges were compounded by a complex hybrid technology environment, made up of both legacy and modern tools. This created substantial barriers to effective incident response and cross-team collaboration. Specifically, the technological fragmentation hindered their ability to quickly identify, diagnose, and resolve issues across their critical payment infrastructure.
Key challenges included:
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Fragmented use of Dynatrace: Originally deployed with an out-of-the-box, developer-focused solution – it lacked consistency and governance. It also missed the opportunity to leverage it across the enterprise. Instrumenting Dynatrace across the organisation would provide a single source of truth for system health, reduce duplicated effort across teams, enable faster root-cause analysis, and support more automated, intelligent incident response – ultimately improving uptime and service reliability.
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Poorly configured integration with ServiceNow, resulting in excessive noise in the CMDB and ineffective incident assignment.
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Poor governance: Limited documentation, no central standards, and minimal business context applied to tooling.
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Siloed practices not fit for scale: A growing ITSM practice using ServiceNow but lacking maturity and cross-team alignment.
The Approach: tailored, context-led consulting
Avocado was engaged to uplift and realign the integration between Dynatrace and ServiceNow — not with an off-the-shelf solution, but through a consultative, discovery-led approach rooted in the client’s unique context and operational reality.
Key activities included:
Stakeholder workshops and discovery:
We led collaborative sessions with client teams to define:
- What types of data should be brought into ServiceNow from Dynatrace?
- What specific information about each item is critical for operational decision-making?
- How should incident priority be determined?
- Who should own each asset or incident, and how should new items be added over time?
These questions helped tighten the vision of the target state and ensure the solution aligned with the client’s business processes and standards.
Standards definition:
Collaboratively established five key standards for integration — covering data types, required fields, incident prioritisation, ownership, and change procedures. These standards helped define the goals of remediation activities and provided a clear framework for identifying which accounts and records in the CMDB should be retained, updated, or retired.
Leveraging Dynatrace’s customisability and tagging:
Dynatrace’s flexible platform allowed us to apply rich business context through tagging. We worked with stakeholders to define service categories — such as BPay Payments or core infrastructure — and tagged monitored resources accordingly.
These tags enabled Dynatrace to communicate ownership, service grouping, and support responsibilities to ServiceNow’s CMDB, ensuring:
- CMDB records were populated with accurate context
- Incident tickets were automatically routed to the correct support group
- Business services could be dynamically monitored and prioritised
ServiceNow CMDB clean-up:
Retired approximately 26,000 outdated or irrelevant records to reduce noise and improve reliability.
Automation Implementation:
- Automatically assigned Dynatrace-generated incidents to the correct ServiceNow support group, relieving a 24/7 triage team from manual intervention
- Enriched Dynatrace resources with business context tags for better alignment with ServiceNow’s CMDB
From a business perspective, we automated the incident creation process from Dynatrace alerts and the tagging of discovered resources to carry the correct business context into ServiceNow’s CMDB. This enabled intelligent routing, reduced manual triage, and supported a more accurate and maintainable configuration database.
Joint Design & Execution:
Worked alongside ServiceNow engineers to redesign both CMDB and incident alerting integrations.
Strategic Planning & Enablement:
Following early success, Avocado partnered with senior leadership to design a strategic roadmap that prioritised high-value initiatives and created business-wide buy-in for further enhancements. We focused on configuration standards and data consolidation to ensure seamless information flow across the technology ecosystem.
The Outcome: stronger foundations for operational maturity
Overall, we collaborated with key stakeholders and subject matter experts across the business to align Dynatrace and ServiceNow usage with organisational goals. The engagement delivered measurable and sustainable improvements:
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Reduced Noise: Significant drop in false or misassigned incidents and CMDB clutter
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Improved Governance: Standardisation enabled clearer ownership and more accurate triage
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Better Context: Dynatrace tagging now feeds meaningful business data into ServiceNow
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Stronger Integration: Both platforms now work in tandem to support real-time ITSM operations
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Scalable Foundation: The company now has a standards-driven framework to extend and mature its monitoring and service management practices
The completed integration transformed incident management by automating the discovery and mapping of infrastructure and applications into the CMDB. When Dynatrace detects issues, incidents are automatically generated in ServiceNow, complete with contextual mapping to configuration items. This streamlined flow dramatically improved operational response capabilities, giving teams end-to-end visibility into ownership and root causes – supporting the company’s critical role in Australia’s financial infrastructure.
