ServiceNow Reviews

I worked on the CMDB configuration management setup, and then previously I worked on software asset management also and hardware asset management also. I did a little bit on the ITSM side also.

The incident management is great.

We have found change management and CMDB to be very useful. 

The knowledge management is quite good.

The AAR might require further improvements.

There are areas such as technology management that have scope for further improvement. 

Their cloud management is also not that great compared to other products.

There could be some additional capability for discovery. As it matures, it needs to showcase to users what is possible within the solution.  

I have been using it for the last seven years or so, on and off, and especially in the last three, four years, more on a more regular basis. I'm using it almost daily at my job.

The solution is stable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

Sometimes the CMDB, BK table gets slow, however, almost all of the other things are good, at least.

The scalability of the product is very good. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so.

Technical support has mostly been good. We have no complaints in terms of the level of service.

Whether the initial setup is difficult or complex depends on the implementation. We have done multiple implementations, however, it depends on the product's implementation on the consumer end. It can vary from straightforward to complex.

The deployment also is product-specific, customer-specific, et cetera. It depends, for example, on the number of customers, the particular, specific scope, and which product is required, and how many users and devices that they have. All these things come into play and change how long it would take to set everything up.

The size of the team a company might need for deployment and maintenance is product and scope-specific, however, it can vary from one or two people to even maybe five to ten people, depending on which products are in scope, and what is the scope of maintenance requirements.

If the project is for the ITSM, it'll be 18 or 19 managers playing a role, and the rest being the configuration managers with other things. However, it depends on the project.

We're an implementor. We handle the setup for clients. 

I'm a consultant. We are a managed service provider. As part of the implementation, the client usually does look for a cloud for it.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. I deducted a mark as sometimes there is a certain level of slowness, however, for the most part, we have been happy with its capabilities. 

We use this solution for many things, such as ITFM, incident problem change, configuration, and vulnerability response.

There are a lot of features within ServiceNow. There are plenty of add-ons that go beyond the typical core helpdesk operations, such as HR facilities, BRM functionality, and various compliance and governance capabilities. Additionally, they provide a strong security suite with vulnerability, no-code integration, self-service options, and a virtual assistant. 

In an upcoming release, there should be more administration tools.

I have been using this solution for six years.

The solution is very stable. However, we did have an outage once because their data center was potentially down.

We have not had any issue with the scalability, it is very good. 

We have 17,000 users and out of those we currently have approximately 1200 active users using this solution.

When we had an outage the technical support contacted us to let us know what was happening. They have an engineering level of support that is very good. 

They could do more follow-ups in relation to issues being resolved.

I would rate the technical support of ServiceNow an eight out of ten.

I am working for a large company and we were using another service provider before that was expensive and complex. I am not sure how many people are still using the old service we were using before because it is outdated compared to other solutions. ServiceNow has a lot more people supporting it, it is a lot easier to find developers, and it is a much more modern platform.

The setup starts out easy but it can get complex quickly.

It is important to be prepared for yearly system updates. Normally your subscription will come with access to those new updates but you need to be ready to quickly update to the latest versions.

I have found the solution very expensive.

My advice to others is to make sure they understanding what they are going to use ServiceNow for which is important. There are a lot of cheaper solutions that can do many tasks, such as tracking and work management, that might satisfy their needs better. With this solution, as your company scales up, you are going to need more people to support it. It is a very popular platform and requires a lot of configuration and development to make it useful to an organization. 

Everybody wants to customize the solution to make it fit their business model, which is what it is meant for. Even though they have no-code development tools within the platform, having well-skilled developers in your organization will help you move along smoothly. 

Having a team that can support the solution is important for success. Unless you have it outsourced, However, you will still have the governance aspect of it to oversee what the roadmap is.

I rate ServiceNow a nine out of ten.

We use it for a combination of things. I would say that the two big use cases that I'm aware of are for logging general acute IT issues. Then they also use it for actual security-specific issues. These are the two main use cases that I'm aware of. 

In terms of the most valuable features, it's nice to have everything in one place. Things are easy to follow up on. ServiceNow provides that workflow. I know at some level it is in the pipeline and then if I need to follow up, everything's there. Those are the key benefits of ServiceNow. 

I find ServiceNow to be a little bit clunky. If I need to report an issue they have a number of different options. I can report an issue, I can ask a question, I can make a request and it has varying levels of importance or levels of attention required. I find that what's required to submit is not always clear. 

For example, I was once trying to import an issue and it required that I submit a screenshot. I kept clicking to try and get through and there were some paper clips in the rear upper corner that I didn't notice and I didn't know were required. That kind of issue bugs me about it. The guidelines are not as easy to use. I think it's a little bit clunky. It's not user-friendly.

We have had ServiceNow installed for at least the last three years.

I've never had an issue with it in terms of stability. It's always available when I need it.

As far as the scalability of this solution, my guess is it is probably good.

The setup was pretty straightforward. They rolled this thing out and nobody has been swapped over from the road system is pretty seamless.

This solution is fine, and I would certainly tell others to give it a look.

I don't know if there are more features available. It needs a more intuitive interface. They need to make it easier to understand what's required and probably make it a little nicer looking because it looks industrial.

I would rate it a seven out of ten.

I use ServiceNow for incident management, problem management, change management, and request management.

I have found that sorting and grouping functions are particularly useful.

I find some features are difficult to use. For example, the creation of service catalog forms. Creating service catalog forms could be made easier.

In the next release, I would like to see some of the features and processes made to be simpler to use. For example, creating the service catalog forms, doing the CMDB, and integration with other systems have to be made easier to use.

I have been using this solution for almost two years.

It's a stable product.

This solution is scalable.

In our company, we have approximately 1,000 users. For me, I use it every day.

I rarely engage with technical support. I had a good experience with the one or two tickets that were submitted. They were able to resolve the issues and it was a positive experience.

Previously, I was using Jira. 

Jira is meant for small enterprises and it is much cheaper than ServiceNow. 

ServiceNow is meant for a much larger user base.

I was not a part of the initial setup. By the time I arrived, it had already been set up by someone else.

We have five to eight people with various tasks to maintain this solution.

I believe that they had an integrator to help them set up. That was in 2018. before I joined the company.

The licenses are expensive.

They pay a license fee per user. Jira is much cheaper than ServiceNow.

If I was in a small company with 500 users or less, I would use Jira. If I am in a company with 500 or more users then I would use ServiceNow.

For anyone who wants to start using ServiceNow, they need to ensure that they have the funds to finance it. The licenses are not cheap and they need to have a consultant that can help them to customize the functions or the features they need.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use case is IT service management. It encompasses quite a few things, such as incident records, change records, etc.

It uses a common base of data and allows different types of records to pull from that same base of data.

The ability to link different types of records with each other.

• The ability to embed help information onto the screens.
• The scalability needs improvement.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate stability as a seven.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate scalability as a four.

On a scale of one to 10, I would rate technical support as a seven.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

The most important thing to have in place is the face of the configuration data.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Scalability
• The development model: How are updates made and promoted to production.
• Ability to embed user help information directly to the interface.
  

For the most part, we have used prior ITSM solutions and they have been a bit more difficult to integrate and customize into the rest of the things that we do as they are standalone products. Something like ServiceNow ITSM, where there is such a good foundation within a relationship between items and some very good capabilities to extend into our existing automation, workflows and things of that nature, is something that we're definitely looking forward to.

We want to end up getting set up as part of Discovery with a type of automatic relationship. In addition, we have been looking at a means to provide a service catalog experience to the business as a whole and are looking forward to potentially implementing a service portal.

Actually, the biggest problem that I see for it, especially in a smaller organization, is that there are plenty of partners. We've got a fairly advanced IT organization. We do a lot of relatively advanced stuff for the size that we are, but ServiceNow itself is so big and to some extent, there is a significant amount of complexity that you have, a big learning curve I would say, in order to really get on board.

It doesn't mean that you can't attack it in pieces and things like that, but I think one of the problems I've had just in getting involved within the last couple of months, is trying to kind of weed out what I don't necessarily need to look at and focus on, just a specific area and trying to find best practice documentation of that matter is, has been a challenge.

In many cases, it really just doesn't exist. I mean, we know we've got the documentation and everything else, and they tell you all the things that you can do. I mean, again, it's one of these things where I think everybody likes to begin a little better, would like to begin with a template, or some kind of a best practice template given their situation if they can find it, and then, you know, kind of build from there. Because when you're starting just with a completely blank scratch pad, you just don't know where to go.

I think the thing that I've always been concerned with implementing a new product is being able to really spend a proper amount of time upfront with design and making sure I'm designing something that won't limit my choices or my abilities to use it, or will keep me from having to just go back and completely rewrite the whole thing in the future. I've not gotten that comfortability yet with the product and it's after a couple months. There's a huge learning curve with the product.

Also, we have not really had a good view of our different configuration items. 

I don't really think that we're running into too many stability issues.

The product scale's wonderful. We don't have to worry about the scalability and someplace else. Even within our organization, we're not finding really any major issues with scalability and things of that nature.

Most of what we have to just be concerned with is that we almost have too much information. It's like going from having nothing to taking a fire hose worth of information and trying to figure out, "Okay, what do we really maybe not have to pay attention to initially? What are we going to focus on?" I wouldn't say there are any issues with the product right now from the performance and scalability point of view; it's been performing very well.

Altiris is the product we're getting out of. I think there's a lot to be said for actually having a web-hosted solution these days. There are a lot of things you don't want to actually bother to manage yourself internally.

I think because we're starting to look at so many other areas that are potentially out in the cloud, such as we're using Workday for HR, and the potential integrations that we even have from a cloud perspective, once we've got ServiceNow and the ITSM piece of the cloud. Those are, I think, major selling points over just the overall flexibility over what we had in the previous product.

At this point in time, it's interesting because a lot of what I'm seeing, there's a lot of momentum right now towards ServiceNow. It's one of those things amongst everyone, not just in the industry; a lot, all over the place. It's in a major growth mode. I'm not entirely sure they're going to see too many of the other products being able to keep up. It's one of those things; if you're looking at future-proofing yourself, and there's a lot of this, there are a lot of strategies for going with a cloud partner. I realize there are some cloud competitors who have started up out there with ServiceNow. I've heard them infrequently, but it's kind of like, "Do you want to go with the company that's got the most resources and the most money to put toward development of their product, or in something where everybody's focusing on?" You've got a large third-party contingent supporting the product and things of that nature, and more and more development going toward it all the time. Or, "Do you want to go with something where you're not going to get the benefit of that same thing?" I think right now it would be hard to go with anybody else.

As I'm a developer, what I would say is that it's very flexible. The tool can be fully customized. You can do anything to everything, and so I would say that would be the key feature for me as a developer. I can do whatever the client asks for as everything is possible.

Let's say what happens is the customers want rapid delivery to get their operations. So for that they need something to be implemented, at least a vanilla system very easily. So ServiceNow's out-of-the-box features are so good to start with and then down the line, let's say they use it for three months, then it's very easy to just change things.

First of all, nowadays customers are moving all their native applications into ServiceNow. So it's definitely a kick start for them to start using the out-of-the-box features, and then realizing the potential of this tool, and then start getting their native applications loaded to ServiceNow. And eventually down the line after a few years, all their applications will be in ServiceNow. So now you have a single source of truth.

It's mature, but I would say that there are a couple of models, which I think in ITSM, they are not that mature yet. They're still doing it, and definitely even to customize it, but I am talking the out-of-the-box product. When you say ITSM, some of the processes I would say aren't that mature enough because I also have gone through the ITL training.

In particular I would say the SLA, but they have a new release. They have added a couple of features and that should suffice. That was the gap of the earlier version.

There were issues deploying Fuji, but not after that.

It's a very new system, and we see bugginess. In Helsinki we found that we were using one feature but we kept getting errors. I thought it was something that I did, so I spent three or four hours and I couldn't get my answers. So then I realized I basically re-realized when I spoke to ServiceNow people and they troubleshooted that it was a bug. In terms of performance it's very good.

It's very scalable. I've been working with two major clients and they're pleased with scalability.

The biggest part is the ServiceNow community. It's very active, and you can just type anything in Google, it's very easy. You'll get answers that way.

I have experience with HP Service Management. That's how I started my career. So in terms of the processes, both are good. While HP was also mature, ServiceNow processors have flexibility which is and that's amazing, and it's easy as well.

When a customer starts with ServiceNow, they go with it out-of-the-box, that's very easy. Just a couple of configurations here and there without any customizations. That's very easy in terms of implementation, and even customizations, it's pretty easy. It's smooth, and that's why we as product developers like the product, because it's too flexible. It's very flexible.

You need to look at what tool you're currently using, what gaps you have, and what pain areas could easily be fixed by the flexibility of ServiceNow. Based on that I would say, OK, why go with ServiceNow and not continue with the one that you're using.

The most valuable features at this point in time for me is the ability for tracking changes, for tying changes in the problem tickets together, tying incidents together to the problem tickets. The interaction between our user to IT aspect, from top to bottom, has been fantastic. Whereas users submits a problem because they have a problem, then we've got to find out if it's a bigger problem, or if it's bug, or SDLC, all this stuff. For me in my role at this point in time, which is changing, it's just tracking everything from bottom to top. We're making sure that stuff is getting done and then communicating back to teams, and it's a full loop.

ServiceNow was implemented over seven years ago. When I came on it was already implemented and I didn't have much of a role in getting ServiceNow changed, add-ins, whatever. They weren't reaching out to other companies. I was basically brought in to do monitoring buildouts, and get our very baseline infrastructure more organized.

I actually don't know. To be perfectly honest, I feel that just about any tool, as long as they have the same offerings, can be modified to fit the company that is attempting to use it. Take a look at an ERP solution. ERP has been around for a lot longer, to a certain degree than say ServiceNow and there is a massive amount of offerings. You can go with SAP. You can go with Oracle. I can't even remember the other guys' names. No matter what, you can always make them work for your company.

They may not have been the best choice for you, maybe there are pluses and minuses. Once you actually get into the application, you start figuring it out at that point it's like, "Well, it would have been better if we went with this, if we focus more on this." The thing is once you get an offering, you still have the ability to go in and configure it to your heart's desire. ServiceNow, it's the full suite of offerings. You have a lot more to sit in and actually go in and configure, as opposed to it's just another ITIL based application that I can sit in and configure.

I know there are places that they can do better at. While I'm not an administrator, I'm not sitting there configuring it, I know our person who does configure it does have his foibles. There are certain things that are difficult to get out of ServiceNow, which is why I suggested going to partner companies that are using ServiceNow already in your similar environment. You go to ServiceNow and say, "Hey. This is what we want to do. How can we accomplish this?" ServiceNow says, "You can do it any way you want."

It's like, "That's not an answer." It's like, "What should we do? We need guidance." Well, "No. you can do anything with it." Okay. That doesn't quite help me as a user, and future administrator, or as an executive. I'm sure it sounds great for an executive, but when it comes down to it, when it starts growing in your own environment, executives starts asking questions, "Why hasn't it been doing this?" It's like, "We don't know how to get that matured within our own environment." It really comes down to I think they can improve upon. They are doing that here with the networking, but for as themselves, have their own best practices to a certain degree.

To a degree, yes it's stable, but mostly it's due to data center issues on their side, or it's come down to network issues on our side. Since it's external, it's not internal, you're looking at having to deal with Internet weather, or data center hosted environments, or our instance had the issues, which is pretty rare.

It's been a long time. It's been a very long time. I think mostly they had a roll back of, not a build or an update. It was some type of data change, but I don't recall the details as it was several years ago.

I wouldn't know because I don't actually handle any of that aspect. Again, I'm still pretty new to actually having my hand in helping with ServiceNow. I don't have any of the hands-on experience. I'm more of a user at this point than an administrator of certain degrees.

I've used many other types of applications such as HEAT, or Remedy, any of those guys and a couple others that I can't remember the name of. They're all customizable to a point. Obviously, not many of those previous ones actually had a full ITIL buildout, or full offering as ServiceNow does. From my point of view and my aspect, I'm more concerned about user experience, and more concerned about backend experience as an IT professional coming in and trying to fix issues, and track said issues. ServiceNow has a much bigger offering in the sense that you've got new changes. You've got your problem ticket findings. You've got tracking for CIs, and the CMDB database, and sitting on the backend trying to provide all that data for those tickets, and whatnot, throughout the company. It makes it a lot easier. It's definitely a one-stop shop for being able to actually come in and help your users, but also help your full infrastructure, your backend.

From what I've heard, and all I can go off of is hearsay, it was pretty easy comparatively. I don't know what they were using before for any ticket tracking system, but that's initially what they jumped into was ticket tracking. We needed something to be able to support our IT infrastructure and our service desk. They also wanted to be able to track changes, and do that. It was just like, "Okay, we'll start with this, and start growing more and more." It turned into quite a bit more. We have definitely stepped up using a lot more of the offerings that ServiceNow has, mostly because we have to, to some degree, to be able to make things a lot more efficient. It's worked for us from what I can tell.

You want to sit there and plan. You probably don't want to turn everything on right from the get go either, because then you're just going to overload yourself. The same goes with any type of a larger offering that has hooks into other aspects of your infrastructure. If you turn everything on, you're just going to get overwhelmed, and not actually have proper resources to be able to handle those. It's always start turning things on, start figuring out what the workflow is, and go from there.

Make sure you flesh out what you're doing. Honestly, I see all the pitfalls are the ones where you'll have a misunderstanding, or make a bad choice in configuration. If you believe that the offering is going to work for you, then you need to make sure you reach out to people who are going through similar situations, or rather it's three years in advance in your same situation. Find another partner company that has already gone through the preliminary, but not too far in the future because then you just look and say, "Wow. They completed so much. How are we ever going to get there?" A year or two, maybe three, and talk with them, figure out what their pitfalls were, a similar type company hopefully.