ServiceNow Reviews

Multi Tenant, Scalable, Flexible and Stable

It has improved out response time to the client

The reporting is very good. 

The solution has very good automation tools.

The solution has been extremely stable so far. 

The need to improve their technical support services. 

Their dashboards are very, very basic. Maybe if they could develop some sort of very good fancy-looking, visible, graphical, visible kind of appearance. 

The pricing of the solution could be better. It's a bit high.

When we are monitoring, for example, a device, an S-Switch, we can create insights. We can segregate the LAN, and create a VLAN. When we create those VLANs, we should be able to monitor those VLANs. The same with storage systems. The LANs, through the cable space level, should be able to be monitored. 

I've been working with the solution for eight or nine years so far. It's been almost a decade. I've used it for a while now. 

The stability is excellent. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. I find it to be reliable. 

The solution works very well for large enterprises. If you have a very, very big setup, it's an ideal option.

Technical support could be better. We are not satisfied with the level of support they offer.

I've also worked with SolarWinds and ManageEngine. I prefer ServiceNow, as there's a lot of automation tools available in that and it's been a stable product. It's been in the market for a long time. It's got a good market reach also.

Very Complex, 13 companies, 9 Towers, 17,000 devices

First time we implemented it through Vendor and we took a training from the OEM and now we have a team to deploy the solution

Not calculated, but I would say 2 years we recover the cost 

Their pricing is relatively high. They are expensive.

Yes,

SolarWinds and ManageEngine

We are not a partner or reseller. I'm a consultant. Before that, I have implemented the products. I've migrated a lot of products, a lot of systems. That's how I have an association with monitoring tools and service test tools.

I differently would recommend the solution if a company is a huge enterprise. For example, if you are maybe looking at more than some 10,000 or 20,000 devices. There should be a minimum of 10,000 devices or 15,000 devices. I would recommend ServiceNow for those setups. For data centers and other things, definitely I would recommend ServiceNow. I would not recommend SolarWinds or ManageEngine for these types of setups. I don't see that much capacity in them. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

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.

Some of the valuable features I have found the solution to have are it can serve many different types of businesses, it has strong platform capabilities, provides application development, built-in predictive intelligence, and performance analytics reports.

I have been using the solution for six years.

The stability of the solution is very good.

We have customers using the solution in medium to enterprise-sized businesses. The solution is not meant for small-sized businesses.

The technical support we have experienced was excellent.

The initial setup is really easy. Having a complex environment could add to the installation time but typically the solution can be up and fully operational in six to eight weeks' time.

The solution is priced for medium to enterprises sized businesses. However, it is expensive compared to competitors. Small businesses would have a hard to justify the price, it would not be cost-effective for them.

Those wanting to automate all of your internal functional departments under one system platform I would advise before implementing this solution to train and educate your teams on the use of these types of solutions first. This will allow for an easier transition.

I rate ServiceNow 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.
  

To me, just the initial interface is very intuitive and user-friendly and I think it's just going to be yards ahead of what we've been doing previously. Since it's so intuitive, it's easy to use. In the middle of whatever you're doing, you can drill down or build reports or save your filters. I think it's going to save us a lot of time on building and people asking other people for information when they can get it themselves.

The integration between asset management and ticketing and having it all under one roof is going to help us become more efficient.

It's really too early for me to tell because it's such a vast difference in what we have already. I haven't run into anything yet that I would say needs to be improved. Again, we're just starting.

I'm not sure if they have the software-as-a-catalogue yet, as far as bringing in the software titles with all of the rules of engagement for the software licensing. Right now, the competition has it, so the tool that we have now it makes it a lot easier on the people running the software compliance because then they're not guessing at how the licensing works. Then they had somebody in the industry telling them exactly the right thing to do without trying to figure it out for themselves and perhaps making mistakes.

Too early to tell, but not that I'm aware of. That part is not really my area, but I haven't heard of any.

I have no idea. I suspect it's great, though.

We were using CA Service Desk. The learning curve is going to be a lot shorter. The interface is much more user-friendly and, again, the integration is much better.

It's going to be pretty complex, but it's because we've got data coming from a lot of different sources. From what I've seen on the imports, ServiceNow isn't going to be reason it's going to be complex. They're going to make it a lot easier.

We've brought in a third party.

ServiceNow is such a broad framework that you can basically touch upon any improvement that you want to do in your company. Whether it's financial, healthcare or HR related. I think you can use your imagination to build anything that you want to improve. I think that's the greatest power of ServiceNow - it's basically a generic optimization too.

What I really like is that it's going a bit away from purely IT but it allows you to compose a service catalog or an asset database. That can be the basis of purchasing, request performance or validation. For example for healthcare, you load all the assets of technical healthcare systems into ACNB database which can be used to find out which hospitals have an MRI machine available.

You can go in all kinds of directions and I think that's what is most powerful. They use mechanisms to attract people to the system. I think the user experience is improving so fast, they use the example a system of record and system of engagement. I think it's exactly that. It attracts people that normally wouldn't have so much interest in a system like this but because it communicates a bit like WhatsApp it appeals much more to what they like to do. Then I think the biggest step of implementing such things is not the imagination of knowing what to design, what to develop but how to implement it in an organization. I think that's the biggest step, basically changing your organization to adapt to the new functionality or the new way of working you want to introduce. I think that for companies it's the most difficult aspect.

Architects and solution designers can come up with the greatest things but more complex organizations cannot just be blended into an ideal model. There's always contradicting stakeholders especially in the field of service management. I'm doing an assignment with a large bank and their service management belongs the service management department. The IT company that does the nominal incident resolution for us feel responsible for service management. We have a security and compliance department who feels responsible for service management. We have a functional support department that feels responsible for service management. Everybody has an opinion on service management, everybody has an opinion on CMDB. If you want to change something with a great idea, they have to get all those people on board to get the decision made and then to have it implemented. I think that is the tricky bit and that's what you don't hear all the time.

Well the funny thing is that we develop based on ServiceNow and you see a lot of apps being made. I think whenever you see shortfalls or improvement opportunities for ServiceNow that are being built by third party companies, the next release of ServiceNow includes it all. There must be aspects that are currently not there in ServiceNow and my bet is that it will be there next year. That's difficult for development guys like us but on the other hand it makes the product stronger all the time.

What I'd like to see is the fact that Performance Analytics should be a stand-alone reporting tool, and allow you to drag and drop within the data cubes or the dimensions in the data model. Let's say I want this on the y-axis and I want this on the x or I want this in this in this kind of graph. You can throw around with the fields and immediately you see the graphs being populated. I think from a customer point of view, they should be able to be in the power to have their idea created right there on the spot and not being dependent on an implementer who comes and does this consulting for them. I saw good examples in BMC which I haven't seen on Performance Analytics but they just bought the products, they're just expanding on that. What I see is that companies sometimes use an external tool for presenting dashboards to customers, like Numerify or Grafana or this 3rd-party dashboarding solutions. I think it's a waste if ServiceNow is not able to keep those customers on-board.

I think ServiceNow can improve more towards the customer to allow them to do that themselves. If they implemented some frameworking, set it up for you and then say, "Okay, this is what you can do and this is the freedom you'll get." Then you can throw or you can toss around with the data in any way you would like.

On the platform, on the framework called ServiceNow there's all kinds of interacting systems like SAP and Oracle. I think what you see is that maybe SAP will not be needed that much anymore in five years from now because a lot of functionality that a company needs is offered through the platform called ServiceNow.

I don't know where that's going to end because at some point ServiceNow will become a marlock and people will turn away from a 'one solution fits all' and go more into the niches again. I don't know where it's going to end. Until now I think it looks very promising and yeah, I think very much appealing to most customers.

We have used it only for a couple of months because we're a start-up. Personally, I've used it a little over a year.

One of our partners is the technical guy, he's developing now on the development instance.

The only thing I can come up with is the fact that we ordered an instance with domain separation or activated that wasn't there from the scratch. We had to raise an incidence and to get it resolved and stuff. You know that it takes you one or two weeks and then everything is done and then it's passed to you.

We used a solution from HP.

Out-of-the-box stuff is very easy to deploy but when you have specific demands then maybe of course it is more complex. For us it was quite easy because we had a developer instance already so we developed most of our products in that instance. We couldn't get stuff like the domain separation completely functionally the way we wanted it. We could develop already, so when we purchased our instance I think it took us 2 - 3 weeks to get everything up and running.

I would definitely advise you to transition into ServiceNow because I've seen comparisons with the BMC Projects which is a lot more expensive. I haven't seen any functionality that I would really like except maybe for some Performance Analytics functionality that is more user friendly than what I saw.

We primarily use it for change management and incidents. We get the greatest value from our change management. We recently moved to ServiceNow from HP Service Manager about two years ago and it's been leaps and bounds just better than what we had before. We're able to do our approvals, automated approvals through email, through other means, and it's just made everything so much more smooth.

We found because we're working on an internal cloud solution right now, we found that being able to integrate with other solutions it's been so great because we're able to use the APIs and web service calls to integrate with SCCM, Microsoft's orchestration tool and we're just been able to find that it's so versatile in working with other products and it's made everything so much easy.

The only complaint that I would have is just the interface itself is not always user friendly. We get some complaints from users that they don't know exactly what all the features, all the fields mean, and what they're used for. I guess I want it to be  a little more user friendly.

I wasn't really involved in the installation of it. I'm more on the admin side so I can't really speak to that.

We do our maintenance updates about once a month but we haven't really had any downtime at all since we've put it in place. We recently went through an upgrade about a month ago, a couple of months ago, and there was no issue, there were no issues at all.

We haven't really had to do that yet because it's fairly new in our environment we haven't really had to scale it yet. We're basically using the same infrastructure that we put in initially.

Upgrades are fairly easy. Like I said, we don't have any real issue when it comes to updates and maintenance and things like that. I would say we haven't really had any major downtime incidents since we've had it in place.

I think getting your support team involved early on so that they understand how the process is going to change from whatever they're currently using is a big key. We had some growing pains initially going from one system to the other, but getting the support team involved early on in the process would be very beneficial to anyone that's moving forward with ServiceNow.

It acts as a one-stop shop for customers to be able to go in and create instant problem tickets if the incident is severity one or two. But basically, it's a one-stop shop because beforehand we were using multiple ticketing systems, mainly by email. So now instead of having that we just have them go in, log a ticket, and then its assigned to whatever group and whatever the group it's assigned to goes ahead and takes care of it.

We were doing our user on-boarding via email, and it involved a lot of emails going back and forth. Now, it's just a ticket. Our security team gets provisioning tasks. You can log an instance, use a service catalog, we have provisioning. It's just as important for them to go to one place. On a macro level it helps us do things more efficiently.

I can't wait until we get to Helsinki and such. There are some cool things that I have seen. Portal. The drag and drops which we currently don't have with Fuji.

We've been using it for three years, and we're currently on Fuji patch 3. I'm in the process of fixing our patching problems because there were some issues. Once I get it done, I will go ahead and bump us up to Fuji, patch 12 or so. Then we have a project where we are going to simplify our system, and we have a lot of customization so we are going to kind of try to go back out of the box.

They wanted a ticket to where the customer would see a general global ticket and not have to go through and see if it was an incident or a general request or whatever. And this one particular ticket and the way they have it set up is fairly complicated. They didn't use global tables that should have been used, they customized it and now we are having issues. So we are going to try to get it back to where it is a more simple thing and this should make it more stable.

The system admin. We have another guy that's our business analyst. But we have around 20,000 people in the company. Its global, so everyone is using it well we hope everyone is using it. We've added the catalog, we've made it global within the last year. So we have North America, Australia, Northern Europe and Central Europe. And we're hoping our European people are using it as well as Australia. But there used to be a lot of emails and stuff bouncing back and forth rather than using catalog.

We were using ChangeGear which was kind of limiting. We're a global company now. I don't know, I wasn't in on the why we changed but I know that we were using ChangeGear now before Service Now and it just wasn't suited to our needs.

I think that the way they set up global ticket there was a lot of development, so fairly complex. If they had not done all the customizations, it would have been a lot better, a lot easier and more straightforward.

I would recommend it. I would recommend not doing a lot of client scripts. Not doing a lot of customization. Stick with the out of the box, it's easier to upgrade, easier to implement. The people who are behind the scenes like I am need to go and find things in the Wiki. It's much easier to find, to fix that type of thing.

I've really enjoyed working with it, and I guess it's just the way we have things set up. It's a little frustrating not being able to find things, all the stuff I have to go through to get things fixed.