ServiceNow Discovery Reviews

We use ServiceNow Discovery to update our CMDB and to discover the used software assets. In one flow, we can run all the scripts necessary for ITOM for the CMDB and software asset management.

The CMDB is an important database for the whole organization, not just operationally but increasingly for security. For example, in ServiceNow Discovery, we can find servers or services we were unaware of and stumble on vulnerabilities from those devices. Increasingly, our CMDB is the golden source when that wasn't the case four years ago.

ServiceNow is agentless. This has advantages if you're not utilizing the CPU space of the machines you are discovering. However, the downside is that you always have to discuss logging into servers. It also requires credentials and figuring out where to store them, so an agent solution is likely easier because you only have the credential issue when installing it. After that, you are always in direct contact with your devices. This is also true for cloud because it tends to be immutable once deployed, and an agent makes it much easier to get on those devices. I believe ServiceNow is planning to add an agent, but it does not have that feature today.

Regarding additional features, I believe ServiceNow is planning an introduction in more countries and adding service mapping, which goes beyond the discovery. The addition will try logging into a machine and discovering what connections one node has to another node or a database. Based on that, it will update the connections in the CMDB. So rather than observing the infrastructure and CIs, it observes the services. That will be another part of a separate contract.

We have been using this solution since 2018, using the platform release of San Diego. It is deployed both on-premises and cloud. We install net servers in any data center we want to discover, and there is also a net server running on AWS.

The stability is good and doesn't increase the load of the to-be-discovered machines. I think it's about 1% and it's not a burden for the owners of the machines. The solution works, and we discover our full network every day.

The solution can be scaled differently, and a new net server can be installed. The net server is the distributed solution for ServiceNow Discovery, so it doesn't discover from the SaaS solution and needs a server that runs in the data center that it needs to operate. So if we need more, we install more net servers and do the work in parallel or depending on the need. We can also install it on half of your Windows machines.

ServiceNow Discovery is used only by the operators of the discovery function, which is limited to a team of five to ten people. However, the result can go into the CMDB, which thousands of people use.

We use three to four people for deployment and maintenance. We currently use this solution to full capacity. The on-premises data centers in the Netherlands are fully discovered, similar to cloud. I believe a couple of data centers are yet to be discovered in Japan or Spain. We have 15 different operating countries, and most of them have their own servers in the data center locally, requiring net servers to be installed in those locations. Some of those countries already have it, and a couple of countries don't, but we can probably expand by another ten to 20 percent.

There are a lot of discussions with ServiceNow because improvements are required with the scripts used to collect the information from servers. We usually discuss the level of detail it brings, ensuring that it discovers all the nodes in a certain IP range when it finds a node and what data it collects.

There is a hotline where you can post your tickets, and ServiceNow responds in an adequate amount of time. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

We were using TOPdesk for service management, and no discovery feature was included, so we didn't proceed with it. ServiceNow Discovery is not the cheapest solution, and the pricing model is based on discovered nodes, so if you discover a lot, it becomes expensive. For public cloud, if you set everything to get to discovery, the public cloud makes the pricing model expensive.

We eventually decided that mixing solutions did not help fulfil our strategy, so we stuck with ServiceNow Discovery. We explored other brands like Device42 and Tanium, but in the end, we didn't use them.

The difficulty in installing ServiceNow Discovery is not different from ServiceNow. The networks tend to be separated from freelance, and they all have firewalls you need to go through. So implementing a solution like ServiceNow Discovery, which is quite intrusive on a data center, you always need to work with security on how to implement it safely and practically. For a lot of products, practicality vs security is always a challenge. Deployment is completed in-house with our engineers.

We have not seen an ROI. It is hard to calculate because the data in the CMDB is not quantifiable. For example, we can't quantify the price for a security incident not being resolved or the price for something that is not in the CMDB. The CMDB must become the center and motor of IT operations which is what we are establishing and trying to do. This all subscribes to running IT as a business.

We have a contracted price, but I am unsure of the exact price. We have a three-year contract, and then we agree on a certain amount of nodes to be discovered. ServiceNow will provide a quote which will then be part of the contract. While the contract is in effect, it is possible to overspend, and then we will have new discussions with ServiceNow.

There are no extra costs, ServiceNow does an evaluation every couple of months, and then they monitor whether we are overconsuming. If we are notified, we will discuss the possible expansion of the contract.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. Regarding advice, I would say don't consider a discovery feature as technology in isolation. Discovery contributes to the configuration goal, which is part of IT service management. It needs to be considered as a whole IT service management, where there is a service management tool, monitoring solutions, and configuration. So if there is an incident, we want to know where the incident occurs and the configuration items. If we monitor and then find something, we want to know what the configuration item is to be able to raise an incident.

I would also advise others not to consider Device42 in isolation if you still need to decide on all the different capabilities. For example, if you have service management already in place and are looking to expand towards discovery, then Device42 is okay. In addition, I wouldn't recommend using ServiceNow for service management and Device42 for the discovery part because there is a benefit in having just one platform with one language.

ServiceNow Discovery provides features for discovering information about infrastructure, such as software details and CI (Configuration Item) data, quickly and efficiently.

I believe one of the great functionalities or improvements in ServiceNow Discovery is its ability to gather information about any Configuration Items (CIs). In the future, enhancing the model or software related to CIs would be beneficial.

I think ServiceNow Discovery's configuration management capabilities are effective in enhancing our IT operations. While there may be areas for improvement, overall, it's a good application.

I believe there is room for improvement in ServiceNow Discovery, particularly in providing more detailed information about network usage and communication between ServiceNow and the infrastructure. This improvement would enhance the overall effectiveness of the tool.

I have been using ServiceNow Discovery for the past three years. 

The solution is stable and reliable.

I would rate the scalability of this solution as an eight. While it offers good scalability overall, the reason for not giving it a ten is because the scalability greatly depends on having good processes and support in place. Without these, the scalability could be limited.

I would rate the technical support as medium. In cases where there is an urgent issue impacting the availability of ServiceNow, the response is very fast, but overall, it's a medium-level support.

Positive

I rate my experience with the initial setup of ServiceNow Discovery as a nine. It was quite easy to set up and integrate with our organization's systems. 

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

Primarily for discovering and managing organizational assets and tools. We maintain the hierarchy of all the assets, and if there are any issues, we can remotely configure them without any problems. So, it's useful for that purpose and a high-level overview.

There were various types of organizations, and we had three types of laptops. We could manage the different model numbers in a hierarchy, and the discovery helped us with IP ranges and network changes.

The most valuable feature is its integration with CMDB, as it collects all the data.

Another best feature for me is the ability to set up MID Serve remotely, which is a really nice addition. With MID Serve, we can do the configuration remotely, which saves us a lot of time and effort.

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.

I have been using this solution for three to four months. 

It is stable and works reliably.

I'd rate the stability at around eight out of ten. It works here. But, there are some hiccups that can be encountered, similar to any other solution.  Overall, it's quite stable.

I would rate the scalability around eight out of ten. It's pretty good, especially considering that ServiceNow Discovery is using MariaDB, which enhances its scalability.

There are more than 15 users using this solution in our organization.

The support is good. The documentation was quite good, and the guided setup makes it extremely easy to use, provided you know the right steps, like creating a directory user, for example.

Positive

I would rate my experience with the initial setup a seven out of ten, with one being difficult and ten being easy to set up. 

We had a team of five to six people working on the deployment. Each person had specific skills required for different tasks, such as service mapping, network setup, and the actual discovery process. Having a diverse skill set in the team proved to be beneficial for completing the work quickly and efficiently.

At the basic level, it took me around a week. However, at the organization level, there were a lot of configurations to be edited, and extensive mapping was required. So, in total, the initial setup took around a month.

To start the deployment, we used a target set that can be installed in the MID Server. From the MID Server, we initiated the discovery process using IP ranges provided by the organization or obtained through their routers. This allowed us to discover all the Configuration Items (CIs). However, we encountered an issue with service mapping, which took some time to resolve.

I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, where one being cheap and ten being expensive. 

My advice would be to familiarize themselves with ServiceNow CMDBs and understand how the discovery process works. ServiceNow CMDB is a crucial table management tool for discovery needs. Also, considering the importance of CMDB health management, incorporating it into the usage would be beneficial.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

My role right now in present projects is to deploy ServiceNow Discovery both on AWS cloud an on-premises. ServiceNow Discovery is populated directly into ServiceNow CMDB, so its use cases include managing CMDB identification and reconciliation, as well as creating dashboard reports and other types of reports.

In the past, I found troubleshooting difficult in ServiceNow Discovery because I didn't have much exposure to the platform during that time, but then I explored some troubleshooting features, and I found that it wasn't that tough, so this is one of the qualities I like about ServiceNow Discovery.

I also like that log reading in ServiceNow Discovery is much better than other tools.

Another valuable feature of the tool is that you don't need to install many tools to deploy ITSM. You only need to subscribe to the modules to deploy the proper ITSM in your organization.

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.

I've been learning ServiceNow Discovery since 2015, and I started working on it for the last two years only. I'm still using it, particularly the San Diego version for one project and the Rome version for another project.

ServiceNow Discovery is a stable tool.

ServiceNow Discovery is a scalable tool, especially because the industry has now properly recognized it, so many of the network companies, for example, Cisco, release product versions that have compatibility with ServiceNow Discovery. Companies that manufacture network devices and storage devices also create plugins that have more compatibility with ServiceNow Discovery, which makes the tool scalable.

I haven't had the chance to contact technical support for ServiceNow Discovery yet. My team once raised a ticket to get help, but it was for cleaning a different solution, CMDB.

For any troubleshooting questions and solutions, I check the community forum and documentation. My team and I still have some pending issues with some features of ServiceNow Discovery and we didn't find very specific resolutions or proper answers in the documentation and the community forum.

I found the initial setup of ServiceNow Discovery easy. The process is the same with other discovery tools where some prerequisites need to be deployed within your client's environment, both open and privileged requirements and service accounts to access the environment.

Setting up ServiceNow Discovery is easy because you're provided with a guided setup to install the features, so I found it easy.

The total time it takes to deploy the tool is between one to two days if you have all the required information. Once you have a subscription, you just need to enable some plugins and deploy one integration within your client's organization because ServiceNow Discovery is a cloud-based tool which means you need to deploy one application into the organization which doesn't take more than half an hour. That would also depend on how many MID servers are deployed, so in general, to make the environment ready to start discovery, it would take two days. What could take time would be the credential setups and other requirements provided by the clients, but in total, deployment would take just one to two days for ServiceNow Discovery.

You need a subscription to ServiceNow Discovery, so you can use its features. You can also use specific plugins with the tool, and some of the plugins are free. I don't have information on how much my company pays for the subscription to ServiceNow Discovery.

Nowadays, I've been working on BMC Discovery, ServiceNow Discovery, and CMDB projects.

My company is a partner/implementer for ServiceNow Discovery, but many consultants within the company, apart from myself, also use the tool.

My advice, if you're looking into using ServiceNow Discovery for the first time, is to compare it with other tools and also consider your requirements because not all discovery tools provide all the features you need. For example, one discovery tool could be strong in this area, while the other tool could be strong in another area or feature. You should go for ServiceNow Discovery if it meets your requirements. Otherwise, use another discovery tool. ServiceNow Discovery is a platform that provides full IT infrastructure services, and it's very good for any organization, but that still depends on company requirements, so you need to evaluate those requirements first. For example, check existing devices and infrastructure already deployed in your company and what you'd like to discover through ServiceNow Discovery, whether it's just servers or network devices, etc.

I'm rating ServiceNow Discovery eight out of ten. Though it's a very important tool for users, I'm unable to give it a ten because it still needs to be more user-friendly in terms of reporting. The documentation for the tool also needs improvement, particularly because some features aren't explained well. The tool has very powerful features with no proper documentation available, so some users still have to search for answers in the community forum.

We use this solution to populate the CMDB and to track changes in our environment.

It improves process efficiencies. 

When people need to query for information, they don't have to go to seven different people. They can go to a single source.

It does a good job of collecting the data that's necessary for data centers, and IT's operations.

When it comes to the internal data centers and the on-premise data centers, they are pretty good.

When you switch versions, for example, when you go from Paris to Quebec they will introduce many new things and occasionally things break when they do that. You usually find out after the fact when you stumble into it.

I currently have an issue that we just stumbled into, where our bucket wasn't populating correctly from my own Google cloud. They're trying to figure out how to fix that.

They should include support for Google Cloud.

I have been working with ServiceNow Discovery for ten years.

The version we are using is Paris.

It's a reliable product.

Scalability is pretty good, but they are lacking a bit in the Google Cloud realm.

They are really good in others such as Azure, AWS, and IBM. It seemed to have matured those a little better. Maybe the problem is with Google Cloud being a partner and keeping up with them. I am not sure where it's lacking. Is it ServiceNow or just Google Cloud?

Our users vary from technical people to managers to business people. We do it that way to assign costs so things could be lower.

With the first couple of reports, managers were surprised at the cost, but when you do it in increments throughout the year, you don't realize what the total is coming to until you get to the end of the year.

For the most part, ServiceNow has gone through a few growing pains. They have grown rapidly. 

The first line of support is sometimes lacking. Once you get to the second and third-level people, they are good.

I would rate technical support an eight out of ten. After the first line, you can tell the person is pretty new.

We used Maximo Tatem and it was really cumbersome. 

The data was excellent but you had two different vehicles.

You had your Discovery pool, and you had another server that took the data from Discovery. That had to be mapped into the Maximo database. You then had a Discovery server, with an in-between server that did the translation and put it into Maximo.

It was convoluted.

The Discovery engine was wonderful, but getting the data from Discovery back into the Maximo database was difficult.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

The price could be better. It's a bit on the pricey side.

As a product, they are probably right at the top. Their only competition I would say right now would be Dynatrace.

Dynatrace is missing a few things, but so is ServiceNow. You can take your pick, as they are both good.

The data is really good, it's reliable and they keep adding to it. 

They are using AI with a lot of cases to help build the events, which is good.

I would rate ServiceNow a nine out of ten.

I can't discuss the use cases related to the product since I don't have many projects to deal with in my company that need the use of ServiceNow Discovery.

The out-of-the-box probes and patterns in ServiceNow Discovery are great features.

ServiceNow Discovery is a great tool. 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. It would be great if the tool could handle more out-of-the-box functionalities to retrieve the information for routers, especially those from Cisco, including the updated devices.

I have experience with ServiceNow Discovery. My company has a partnership with ServiceNow.

Stability-wise, I feel it is a good product.

I do have experience with other tools similar to ServiceNow Discovery, but I don't remember the names of the tools I used in the past. Compared to the tools I have used previously, ServiceNow Discovery can be considered a useful product if someone wants to use an agentless solution, meaning you don't have to install any agent in your system.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The solution's deployment phase takes around a month to be completed.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

The solution is for all of our infra components.

The solution is straightforward to set up.

It is stable. 

We can scale the solution.

The solution is user-friendly. 

Between SolarWinds and ServiceNow, there is some communication gap. SolarWinds is able to give infra-related things, however, from a ServiceNow perspective, it'll discover all the things from an IT management perspective in real-time.

If you're integrating both tools, it's not going to integrate. If I'm using SolarWinds Discovery and if I'm integrating it with ServiceNow, in ServiceNow, I cannot get a direct fit. I need to manually play with it. While they function together, we still need to do manual interventions.

ServiceNow is very costly.

You need to recruit some developer support if you want to do some coding, and that is the one improvement area they need to look at.

They should add in infra monitoring.

I've been working with the solution for ten years. 

I've never had issues with stability. The solution is reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. Even if it is on-premises, there are no issues. 

The solution is scalable. 

We have escalated questions to support. However, they are more commercial than technical. 

Neutral

I've also worked with SolarWinds for ten years. 

The solution is very simple to set up and implement. It's not overly complex. 

If you are just implementing ServiceNow, it doesn't take too much time. If I'm using their SaaS-based services, it might take two weeks. 

It is an expensive solution. Per licensed user, it may be around $160 to $180. There may be additional models a company needs to buy for ITSM functionality.ITSM will not work independently, and therefore we need other models. 

I'm an end-user and integrator.

We are dealing with the latest version of the solution. 

We're using both cloud and on-premises deployments. 

I'd recommend the solution to other users. 

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

When my team starting any project or learning a new environment, we always implement ServiceNow Discovery which can be used along with other products. We are able to extract details on the environment to help transition services.

This solution provides excellent insights.

Application discovery could be improved. Right now, ServiceNow needs to be coupled with another solution in order to verify the information.

It is a stable product.

This is a scalable product, especially since it is within a public cloud.

We have not needed to use support.

The initial setup is easy but expect to have to take some time to learn the product.

It is an expensive product with a price that depends on the models that you wish to purchase.

This is something that I would recommend for medium or large companies. 

I would rate this a seven out of ten.