We performed a comparison between Device42 and ServiceNow Discovery based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two IT Asset Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."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 most valuable part is the ease of use. There's no training involved. It's pretty simple and straightforward."
"The most helpful feature in Device42 was the import feature, where you can seamlessly import your information into the configuration database manager."
"The reporting part is valuable. You have classic reports, and you can also do advanced reporting. They also have the DOQL feature for queries. You can write SQL queries to get your data and create custom reports."
"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 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 asset inventory is great because previously we had devices all over the place. We have been able to do multiscans to find devices that we didn't know about, which was great."
"It has agentless discovery; you don't need to put agents on your servers. You can open one or two ports to discover all your infrastructure."
"One of the most valuable features of ServiceNow Discovery is the automated discovery that helps identify dependencies and generates reports."
"I find that the Discovery and scripting features are the most useful."
"The most valuable feature is its integration with CMDB, as it collects all the data."
"This solution provides excellent insights."
"The initial setup is pretty easy."
"Most fields on our forms are auto-filled, reducing manual maintenance for our infrastructure team. Post Discovery implementation there is hardly any maintenance."
"We can find servers or services we were unaware of and stumble on vulnerabilities from those devices."
"ServiceNow's Discovery feature is quite significant because it allows for service mapping and integrates with VIN management. It involves adding a business context to servers, routers, switches, and data centers. This means understanding not only what's installed on these systems and how they function together but also recognizing their significance in terms of business applications from the business's perspective and how they impact business processes and capabilities. So when we delve into these aspects and connect them to the essential components, it can help you engage in more meaningful discussions to enhance capacity management practices. In essence, it contributes to the overall IT portfolio, almost functioning as a business platform. This platform is accessible to users who leverage the data to initiate incidents, implement changes, and resolve problems. Consequently, consolidating all configuration items or assets into a unified platform makes sense, especially considering you already have Discovery in place. If the cost is reasonable, the other two components might not provide much value, except for their user-friendliness, which is often less important to leaders compared to the desired outcomes."
"The reporting could be better. The Insights+ component is an improvement, but they even admit it isn't the greatest. The documentation on their website could also be improved, but Device42 is constantly changing, so the documentation would have to change almost daily."
"I would like to see API management as an additional feature in the tool's future versions. It will give more API security."
"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."
"If I want to delete an asset from a cabinet it does take a while. And if I'm doing it in bulk — say, for example, if we have one cabinet that has 20 servers in — if I want to remove all 20 servers, I have to do them individually, which is a bit time-consuming. If there were a way that I could just bulk-remove everything from there, that would definitely save some time."
"Device42 is a main part of our processes. We need reliability, not only in terms of the data but with the solution itself. It's really difficult when we have 10 minutes of Device42 downtime because none of our teams can work for those 10 minutes, and it's more time lost if there is longer downtime. An improvement would be to have a cluster implementation of Device42 to have high-availability and ensure that we don't have downtime in case of failure."
"The architecture is a bit old-fashioned. Device42 is on one server, appliance, virtual machine, or guest. We are loading more into Device42 than it can hold. Overloading Device42 with REST API calls or tasks will directly impact every aspect because the server will be too busy to answer requests."
"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."
"My biggest problem with the product is the upgrades. First, we have to do them manually and second, not this last time but the time before that, we actually had to build a new VM to deploy the solution again. We had to back it up and then restore it to the new version. That was inconvenient."
"ServiceNow Discovery should be updated to provide its users with more out-of-the-box information and attributes to support the routers and switches from Cisco."
"The initial setup could be made easier. We hired professionals to implement it, and they trained our employees for ongoing processes."
"It is one of the most costly applications in terms of subscription costs."
"In a few instances, ServiceNow has failed to discover some basic things. Some other tools are better at network discovery than ServiceNow. I'm not talking about database servers or any other infrastructure—only networking. Cloud discovery could also be better."
"The solution is too high priced."
"I find it valuable to enhance IP address management. I've been in this field since around 2011, and my experience since then has revolved around automation, deployment, distribution, and comprehensive inventory management, all crucial for deploying various components, including patches. When we talk about patch management or vulnerability management, it's more complex than just applying patches; sometimes, you need to undergo significant upgrades or phase out old components for new ones, and this can turn into a substantial project, explaining why vulnerabilities persist. Now, the role of ServiceNow Discovery and security operations, or at one point, looking at vulnerability management in ServiceNow Discovery, is crucial. It allows you to identify vulnerabilities on assets and, with the addition of discovery, service mapping, and event management, you gain a business context for these vulnerabilities. It's not merely about knowing they exist on a server; it's about understanding which services are responsible for critical business processes or transactions, like payroll. This knowledge changes the approach and execution of vulnerability remediation."
"In my opinion, it's quite slow compared to other tools, like Device42. Also, there are predefined fields in Device42 that are not available in ServiceNow. These are the basic things I think can be improved here."
"What needs improvement in ServiceNow Discovery is the reporting UI because I didn't find it as friendly compared to other tools. Other tools have better reporting UI than what's currently in ServiceNow Discovery. What I'd like to see in the next release of ServiceNow Discovery is more user-friendly out-of-the-box reporting that would be helpful for non-technical users. Some users such as managers would want to just do a few clicks to access the reports and shouldn't be required to do search queries, but right now, reporting in the tool isn't very user-friendly."
Device42 is ranked 6th in IT Asset Management with 25 reviews while ServiceNow Discovery is ranked 7th in IT Asset Management with 38 reviews. Device42 is rated 8.4, while ServiceNow Discovery is rated 8.0. 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 Discovery writes "Valuable relationship building that discovers and auto-builds to make cleanup easy". Device42 is most compared with ServiceNow, ServiceNow CMDB, Infoblox IPAM, JIRA Service Management and Vertiv Environet Alert, whereas ServiceNow Discovery is most compared with Tanium, Microsoft Configuration Manager, Lansweeper, ScienceLogic and Zabbix. See our Device42 vs. ServiceNow Discovery report.
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