We performed a comparison between Device42 and ServiceNow CMDB based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Configuration Management Databases solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The solution's agentless approach to asset discovery is very important for us because installing agents on physical or virtual devices is not easy in our company. We have to escalate these kinds of things to different levels of security. Not having to install agents makes it easy for us."
"The REST API abilities enables us to run scripts that pull information from our servers about software, storage, etc. Anything we need is pushed through REST API to the Device42 server and reflected in the report it generates."
"The most valuable feature was the ability to look up the different assets and see the different attributes that each one has, as well as being able to compare them to other assets."
"The way the solution’s automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality works is you set up a discovery job, then you can schedule it to run. I schedule all of the runs daily at different times so nothing is interfering with anything else. It's nice to know that you can set up the scan, schedule it, and sit back. You can check them every day and make sure everything ran, making sure nothing had errors, then you're good to go. Anything new is going to automatically be discovered, which is nice. It takes some of the stress off because you don't have to know, "If this team opened new servers, we need make sure now it will automatically pick them up." It is one less thing to worry about. It gathers a lot of data points."
"The solution has some very good relational capabilities that show us how certain devices relate to each other and how some of our environment actually works together."
"The Insights+ component is useful for us because it does business application mapping and helps us visualize it. It saves us time because we don't have to hunt for data."
"We use the automatic IT asset discovery for different things, like VMware discovery and SNMP discovery for network devices. It helps us to keep hardware information up to date in Device42, and the VMware discovery helps us to keep virtual device inventory up to date... We are sure to have 100 percent of our devices in Device42. Not more, not less."
"I like the tool's agentless discovery feature. The tool configures the devices based on the documentation provided. I am also impressed with its auto-discovery feature. The tool also keeps on tracking and finds whatever is in the environment."
"Portfolio management is very useful for us."
"It is a dependable source of data. If I want to understand what technologies are used to deliver certain business outcomes, this is what I would use. I can know that this particular server is being used to deliver this business application or business service."
"The product's most valuable feature is its ability to extract the details of organizational hardware and provide the latest setup updates."
"The solution has a single database, architecture, and data model."
"The most valuable feature of ServiceNow CMDB is that it provides transparency and tracking of CI usage across multiple process owners or service owners."
"As I work based on the IT governance framework, what I like best about ServiceNow CMDB is ITSM, so incident/service request management. I also like that it can be useful for project portfolio management."
"We can use ServiceNow CMDB to create more tables that can provide granular information."
"There is a lot of documentation online regarding CMDB."
"Configuring rPDUs in the data center for Device42 required us to add multiple discovery jobs. The rPDUs were referred to the ISPDUs and daisy-chained. They would automatically assign a unique SMP port, but Device42 didn't allow SMP ranges, so we had to create a discovery job for each rPDU individually. We submitted a feature request to mitigate that."
"The only thing which I have noticed so far that is not good is that we had an issue with some reporting from the tool, reporting we had to export. We couldn't do it in the way we wanted to, so we tried to reach out to their support but it took pretty long until we understood how we can manage the reports. We still haven't received a complete explanation of what we need to do and how to do it."
"The resources table needs a few tweaks. We've raised a feature request for this. When you click on resources, it opens up the entire CMDB or the entire data stored in Device42. If that could be customizable, it would be good. We should be allowed to add our own columns to that by writing a script or something like that. There should be an option to add or limit whatever we want."
"If they could make it so their remote connector could do as much as 10,000 devices, that would be better."
"The breadth and depth of the solution's discovery of IT asset information means the system does most of the work, but they need to work on improving the database discovery part, especially for Oracle Exadata."
"The solution’s automatic IT asset discovery and inventory functionality functions pretty well. There could be some improvement if there were some automated scripts to get it off the ground. I know it takes a bit of effort to get all of various managed devices into one place. We have to go and change how they are managed and make sure they are all linking up correctly so they can be tracked in Device42. Some type of automated script for each to get over that initial activation."
"While the automatic IT asset discovery is great, the first time using it can be confusing when you are configuring the SNMP. I don't remember for sure but I don't think it said "SNMP community," it said "password". The first time I used it I was thinking about communities but the tool said "password," and when you say "password" in SNMP you are thinking about SNMP version 3. This is the only thing that is confusing, although there were some devices that were not included in the discovery."
"When servers have two network adapters, automatically discovered will be only one network card because the other one is a backup. Device42 has some problems to find the other connection."
"In general, the pain points are related to ServiceNow. There is a lack of development. ServiceNow is not a true configuration management tool. So, a lot of development is needed to get it to be the kind of tool that you would like it to be. It serves as a platform, and you only get out of it what you invest in terms of development. So, CMDB on its own isn't quite robust until you actually have a CMD project to make it robust. The same thing is there with asset management and all other parts of it. Out of the box, it's not competitive with a like-for-like application."
"There is some customization we need from the customer side."
"Because I'm a SME, the most important thing is the technical help that I can get, so better, more useful technical support would be good."
"ServiceNow CMDB could be easier to use. Beginners don't always understand the features. It would be helpful if ServiceNow offered more training or self-guided courses where people could learn to leverage the platform better. I've used ServiceNow for a long time, but I see new users struggling with these processes. There's a steep learning curve."
"I don't think it's a failure of Service Now or something that they don't offer, but I haven't seen any training modules."
"We have various service levels and SLAs for our customers like platinum, gold, etc. Each SLA has an associated hardware and computing configuration. We cannot define that in ServiceNow for each customer. For example, a customer with 100 servers might be in the platinum category while a client with 25 would be in gold."
"We would like the solution to be made more easily scalable in future updates."
"If you select any CI, the associated applications with that CI should also be made available for users since, currently, the tool lacks such a feature."
Device42 is ranked 2nd in Configuration Management Databases with 25 reviews while ServiceNow CMDB is ranked 1st in Configuration Management Databases with 31 reviews. Device42 is rated 8.4, while ServiceNow CMDB is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Device42 writes "Good reporting and discovery capabilities, and helpful for understanding device dependencies and asset management". On the other hand, the top reviewer of ServiceNow CMDB writes "It has helped us consolidate information, improving reporting and visibility". Device42 is most compared with ServiceNow, Infoblox IPAM, JIRA Service Management, BMC Helix Discovery and NetBox.dev, whereas ServiceNow CMDB is most compared with BMC Atrium CMDB, OpenText Universal Discovery and Universal CMDB and IBM Tivoli CMDB. See our Device42 vs. ServiceNow CMDB report.
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