ServiceNow CMDB Reviews

I am an SME specialist, and we primarily work with government customers who use ServiceNow systems. When they require a CMDB specialist, I am assigned to those sites.

We have customers who deploy the solution on-premises, while others use the ServiceNow cloud.

The issue with UCMDB is that it lacks integration with other solutions, particularly with service management components. On the other hand, ServiceNow excels in integration and is considered the best tool in the market for this purpose. Although it may not be as proficient in discovery as some other tools, its actual integration capabilities surpass all others.

The discovery process and service mapping could be improved. I prefer a more comprehensive approach to discovery and simplified service modeling.

Technical support has room for improvement.

I have been using ServiceNow CMDB for one and a half years.

I would rate the stability a seven out of ten. The discovery process with ServiceNow occasionally fails, and it is quite challenging to identify the cause. There are no clear indications, but restarting the mid servers usually resolves the issue. This problem may stem from pro servers, mixed servers, or various applications.

I would rate the scalability as an eight out of ten. The only drawback is the performance issue we encounter when scaling up.

The technical support is not great.

Neutral

The initial setup is complicated, but compared to other solutions, it is not more difficult. I would rate the deployment an eight out of ten.

The deployment process typically takes around three to four hours. The solution includes a built-in wizard to assist with the deployment, with the only challenging step being the mid-server phase.

I would rate ServiceNow CMDB an eight out of ten. While it remains a strong product, there is still room for development in terms of discovery and service modeling to catch up to its competitors. Nonetheless, it is currently the best option available.

In some instances, our clients are medium-sized businesses, but the majority are at an enterprise level, with thousands of users.

Overall, ServiceNow CMDB is the best option in the market due to its seamless integration with other systems. However, it is not the best discovery tool. UCMDB is a superior discovery tool, but it lacks integration and does not work well with other parts.

ServiceNow CMDB is used for incident management, request management, service mapping, and discovery.

ServiceNow CMDB is a single data model where we can capture attributes. We can have a tree structure with ServiceNow CMDB, which makes it very powerful. We can use ServiceNow CMDB to create more tables that can provide granular information.

ServiceNow CMDB may face performance issues if we try to make the solution too large by adding more CIs.

I have been using ServiceNow CMDB for more than five years.

ServiceNow CMDB is very stable.

I rate ServiceNow CMDB a nine out of ten for stability.

ServiceNow CMDB is enormously scalable. You can store millions of CIs (Configuration Items) in ServiceNow CMDB.

I rate ServiceNow CMDB a nine out of ten for scalability.

The solution’s initial setup is very simple.

I rate ServiceNow CMDB a nine out of ten for its ease of initial setup.

ServiceNow CMDB's deployment time depends on the data, but it doesn't take much time. It's quite fast.

ServiceNow CMDB is deployed on-cloud in our organization. I advise users to have a good conceptual understanding of CMDB (Configuration Management Database). First, you need to understand what your assets are, and on top of that, you can create your building.

It's quite easy to implement ServiceNow CMDB for any new project. The solution is quite easy to use and get reports from. It's quite easy to import data in ServiceNow CMDB.

Overall, I rate ServiceNow CMDB a nine out of ten.

We use it for network and server discovery, and storage.

I like ServiceNow's credential-based discovery.

Integration is complicated and requires advance scripting and customization to complete it.

It would be good to have the ability to customize the UI.

I've been using ServiceNow CMDB for a year.

It is a stable solution.

I would rate ServiceNow's scalability at eight out of ten.

Technical support staff take two to three days to respond to queries. Therefore, I would give them a five out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup is easy, and all functions are built-in. It took about a week to set up.

We chose ServiceNow because it has more functionalities. It takes at least one week to be trained on ServiceNow, and it is easy to learn.

There are multiple plugins and integrations available in ServiceNow CMDB, and we can build the environment that we want. Therefore, I would rate this solution at eight on a scale from one to ten.

CMDB provides a centralized repository for your assets and support representatives throughout the organization.

It depends on the implementation, but the out-of-the-box product tends to be fixed on the support people. From a linear standpoint, I would like to see a certain number of fields on a table and a related list to describe the support personnel.

You can specify leads and responsible personnel. If there were a related list with the job function responsibility and that person's user ID, it could be a dynamic list instead of a fixed one where we have to create columns on a table. I would like to see that functionality out of the box. 

I have used CMDB for five years.

I rate CMDB nine out of 10. ServiceNow products are stable overall. 

I think the scalability is excellent because of the way it's implemented. That said, I would like to see tighter integration with Active Directory, so we get automated reports as people join or leave the organization. That is something we can develop, but it would be nice to have that out of the box.

I rate CMDB seven out of 10 for ease of setup. You have to go through discovery to populate your assets and build out the relationships. That's normal. It takes some additional work, and every installation is different. 

The initial deployment is pretty quick, but the configuration takes additional time, and you need some buy-in from other departments. That process varies. It might be straightforward, or it can be the roadblock to getting things done correctly.

The setup may involve 10  to 15 people because you may need to reach out to other teams to get the data you need. If you're doing a standard deployment that's simply laying the foundation and you have all the information ahead of time, you could get this done in under a month. That's allowing time to address any issues or necessary configuration changes.

I rate ServiceNow CMDB eight out of 10. The foundation is good, but there's always room for improvement.  I think they're addressing the issues, so I'll give them an eight to be on the positive side. CMDB is your foundation. If you get that right, it makes the rest of your ServiceNow deployment go easier.

We primarily use ServiceNow for asset management. We feed our on-prem and cloud inventory into ServiceNow CMDB. We also use it for event management together with Micro Focus Operations Bridge Manager. 

One important element is automation. We can back up and manage multiple configurations. It also enables password self-service. 

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 use Terraform for infrastructure automation on the cloud. The logical mapping in ServiceNow needs to be improved. The logical mapping is limited to the OS layer. I installed a database and one application on top of that. 

I have used ServiceNow CMDB for five years.

I rate ServiceNow eight out of 10 for stability. 

ServiceNow CMDB is easy to scale. We have options. About 700 customers use it. 

I rate ServiceNow support five out of 10. We need to contact them when we want to customize the product for our customers. That takes a little time. Under our support agreement, we get a fast response if we have other issues, but the customization requests take longer.

Neutral

Setting up ServiceNow CMDB is straightforward. 

I rate ServiceNow eight out of 10 for affordability. The pricing is optimal. 

I rate ServiceNow CMDB nine out of 10.

We use this solution to visualize the performance of all of our operation via a table that shows all of our critical surfaces.

We like that this solution allows us to easily track the relationship between our CI and the IT asset module, for troubleshooting purposes, or to check the impact of an incident site.

We would like the solution to be made more easily scalable in future updates.

We would also like to see more flexible pricing models made available that are tailored to usage.

We have been working with this solution for nearly four years.

We have found this to be a stable solution during our time using it.

This solution is scalable, but not easily.

The initial setup of the solution is straightforward as long as all of the requirements have been decided up and detailed beforehand.

We would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Implemented into DWP to manage all technical towers including the EUC tower that manages 120,000 x users. 

The biggest benefactors are the financial team in delivering financial controls and transparency of asset transactions. The finance team can actually manage the asset, and the depreciation of the asset from cradle to grave. 

The Operational delivery teams benefit too from understanding what stock assets they have ready to support live operations - i.e. Assets operationally ready (Goldstock), assets under repair, assets under staging (Build Image install & Asset tag) & Assets under Disposal, Goods-in & RTB. Operational teams with viability of their Stock Management can deliver demand management, meet Service Request SLA targets (joiners and Leavers & Refresh) & Incident SLA targets (B&F Swap)

The Out of the Box (OOB) functionality where you can manage the hardware, asset and the whole stock management is very useful to me. 

As soon as you buy some assets by raising a PO, you can actually track it in the toolsuite. The asset is manage through the whole stock management life cycle. Then the asset becomes a live CI out on the network until it comes back into stock management as faulty or end-of-life. The returning assets it gets managed through stock management and either is re-cycled through repair and staging or follows the disposal route. 

The ServiceNow OOB toolsuite functionality allows you to manage the whole asset life cycle, which is really powerful.

The initial setup isn't too complicated.

The solution is extremely stable.

We've found the solution to be very scalable.

It replaces MS Excel spreadsheets as the tracking tool.

Within the CMDB and managing the assets, ServiceNow works really well. However, it needs to integrate with other toolsets, such as scanning tools. That way, you can bulk upload and bulk transfer assets between sort location and sort location. The E2E solution has a huge dependency on scanning tools and ServiceNow lacks integration with scanning tools. That is actually one of the biggest challenges.

I would like to see them partner with some key scanning technology companies to give them a real end-to-end offering.

I've used the solution for at least the last 18 months.

The solution is very stable and very reliable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The performance is very good. It underpins all the other protocols within the tool suite and it's very good.

ServiceNow has the scalability for enterprise products. It is the best in the market from what I see. A lot of my customers use other tool feeds such as My Top Desk and other options that are a lot smaller, so to speak. They do not have the out the Box functionality, for example. ServiceNow is definitely the leading product.

Over the last 10 years, I would say 90% of my clients have been using ServiceNow. Of the big organizations, 90% are using ServiceNow. The other 10% are smaller companies. If I deal with an SME, and they tend to go for a cheaper and smaller ServiceNow kind of product.

All positive.

Most organisations manage Stock Management utilising MS Excel spreadsheets or Google Docs which is very manual and results in non-accurate reporting and poor controls 

The initial setup isn't overly complex.  The out of the Box functionality is very straightforward. You do not need to do any software development. You can just use the Box functionality to manage the asset end to end.

Organisations need a resource overhead to manage Configuration Management of HAM & SAM either manually through spreadsheets or a SMTS such as ServiceNow. ServiceNow delivers OOB functionality that deliver huge operational efficiencies.

The solution does require maintenance. There needs to be an in-house team that will manage the maintenance. There is an annual big release, and likely quarterly releases as well, and maybe a patch release that would need to be managed. There is definitely a maintenance release cycle maintenance overhead.

Delivered through an external consultancy as a capex project 

Difficult to quantify, but enterprise organisation will get a payback with 3 years through operational efficiencies and financial regulatory reporting 

ServiceNow is expensive but you get what you pay for. Any organisation 5000 x seats and above will get pay-back from utilising the ServiceNow OOB functionality with best practise ITIL processes.

The biggest challenge and cost is the integration of scanning tools with ServiceNow

No - customer had bought and had been using ServiceNow for 3 x years without tapping into the true OOB functionality. The only real option was to implement the OOB servicenow functionality and capability.

Any organization with a user population of 5,000 and above should consider the product as they will get a return on investment. It's not just the cost of the licenses; it's all the maturity and the efficiencies and the capability that will give them a huge return on investment.

The management and control of information and the reporting capability is huge. 

I have worked across a number of customers, where they utilise other Service Management tool suites which do not have OOB functionality to assist the operational teams to manage stock management - this results in managing the process utilising MS Excel spreadsheets which results in poor information and management decisions.

 In general, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

I'm looking at ServiceNow from the standpoint of things like technical services, business services, mapping, deployments, rolling up inventory to those mapped deployments, and doing application services, which takes your inventory and spreads it across all your instantiations.

We are more oriented toward cost control and multiple instantiations of the same product across multiple locations; basically, multiple data setting environments to thousands of deployments.

We'll deploy to our customers and host their equipment. Our customers subscribe to our equipment and we sell our software, but rarely do we sell our software. Basically, our customers pay us monthly to host their software and keep it updated. Our huge customers, companies like Bank of America and Wells Fargo kind of huge, get us to host their equipment. Otherwise, for smaller clients, run on our ASP configuration.

ServiceNow CMDB is just something that you could track everything on. For example, I can service a company with 50,000 employees with hundreds of thousands of servers.

ServiceNow was a platform that they wanted to sell as a development platform, but it didn't have a lot of traction there. So, they basically built a ticketing system because Remedy was a sad environment at the time and they built the next great Aon. ServiceNow is basically a go-to when it comes to Remedy and ticket management. The idea is that CMDB is to track all your assets, how you handle them, how you back them up, how you secure them, and which agents you have on them. To be able to do all that, keep it in the CMDB.

There are areas that could be improved, but that's a longer discussion. It all depends on what you are looking to do with it and then it becomes an issue of how do you configure the CMDB accordingly.  If I were to make one set of suggestions it would be how we defined deployments which would link back to instantiations.  Deployments would need to handle varying degrees of customization and granularity that integrate with Application Services and Business Applications.

I started dealing with ServiceNow back in the days of version D, which was seven years ago. I'm now on version P.

It is stable as hell, but it is always about what are you trying to do with your CMDB to make your company a quicker, faster, and more viable entity in your work or industry.

The initial setup can run anywhere from complex – meaning that you're doing contract management and looking for contract renewals and SLA achievement across contract structures – to just making sure your server has backup.