ServiceNow Reviews

The new developer tools with Geneva have been the most valuable so far. The community is really good too. There's not a lot of tools that I've been an administrator of where the community really helps out like ServiceNow’s does.

I'm not sure about additional features because really, if you need something, you can build it in ServiceNow so that's pretty neat in itself. Working out some of the things that people might have headaches about and for access to certain things in the workflow, like the delivery time and being able to set that dynamically on a request item would be nice. As far as new features, it looks like they're going the right direction. They have ideas that I haven't even thought of.

I've used it for a little over a year.

It has. With the new update in Geneva, there's a few snags with the presence, but they're getting that ironed out. As far as up-time goes, it's always been available.

We haven't needed to scale yet and right now our licenses aren't size-based as far as storage-based goes. I haven't really seen a need to scale at the moment.

Very good. I've worked with other vendors in the past that haven't been nearly as good as ServiceNow's, like CA technologies and SolarWinds. ServiceNow is way better.

I previously used CA UIM. CA didn't really know what was going on and a lot of the stuff they promised was really not working properly. They got us in the contract, though, so it's too late.

I wasn't at the company when the initial setup took place, so I can't really speak on that. As far as upgrades go, it's pretty straightforward. Doesn't take too long and generally goes smoothly.

We will eventually upgrade to Helsinki. I guess we can do it now if we wanted, but we just switched everybody from Fuji to Geneva and getting everybody used to that. The UI hasn't changed a whole lot, but one of the sessions coming up [at Knowledge 16] is the Helsinki features. I'm going to take a look and decide from there whether we should push it quicker or not.

I'd tell them to stay out of the box as much as possible. We've had it for quite a while, I think since 2005. Out of the box as much as possible because once you start developing and making stuff your own and then some cool new features come down the line. It makes a lot of work to look at backing out stuff so you can implement the new features from ServiceNow and then maybe eventually putting your stuff back in. Just stay out of the box as much as possible, alleviate headaches.

For me, it's management and change management. It allows me to figure out if we have issues and when we need to make changes to solve problems. From my side, it's just reporting. Assets, I mean just analytics and stuff like that so I see if there's a high volume of tickets. If we need to resolve something, etc.

It allows us to have asset inventory, incident change - the standard stuff we need in a corporate environment. 

We have the flow from beginning to end. We know when a person starts at the company to one day if they leave. If they have issues, we could figure out why they have that issue and then just go to make changes. For anything we need to push out company-wide, we have all the information ready, so that's the reason we have ITSM.

Performance analytics could be a lot better. I know that's the big thing, they're pushing collaboration and stuff like that. It's just that portion, if that was better done it would be better for us. I the analytics were better and easier, if it didn't require someone with a lot of technical experience to create the reports, but rather if it was more click and drag, then anybody could create these reports. It would be a lot better.

From my standpoint, because we don't have people who are experienced in doing the performance analytics module and stuff like that, ee can't get the right reporting and it's just a beast trying to get that configured the right way. If it was more simplified and easier for us to generate reports, if it was click and drag, you could get all that information and they could produce reports like that. It takes a long time to produce reports.

We started using it about two years ago.

There were no issues with the deployment.

We have had no performance issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

We previously used Microsoft Service Manager. We were on the fence about moving over to Geneva then Helsinki came so we're thinking about moving over to Helsinki. We're trying to get that planned out.

I wasn't involved in the implementation so I can't really say but I don't think it was that difficult. I've not heard any complaints about it, or about the upgrades either.

I would tell you that ServiceNow is a great product to use because just from what we have, what we use, It's highly customizable, there's a lot of features that we like, it's just that performance analytics isn't as great as some of the other pieces that they have.

The core applications are what our business uses day-to-day, including incident, change, problem, service catalogue and knowledge. However, I think the real value comes in when you start using CMDB, discovery, asset management and orchestration. Also, the fact that you can build custom apps and there are additional apps for HR, Facilities, etc. is also what makes this tool great.

It has given us a single source of record across all departments. Also, it has allowed us to automate many processes along with enforcing processes by making them workflow driven.

My only thought is while it is great they are expanding into many different areas of business, don’t forget about the core of this product and why it was originally built. UI and feature enhancements to records like incidents would be great.

I have been working with the release from June 2011 – Geneva.

There have been no issues with the deployment.

There have been no issues with the stability.

With scalability, we have grown quite significantly in the last two years and the performance of our instance has really taken a hit. However, ServiceNow support has been great and we are currently in the process of moving to a new data center and on to faster hardware to improve this issue.

This can be very hit and miss, there are some individuals who are fantastic and a lot of help and then there are others that are not so much. My biggest struggle is with them just not reading my updates and asking the same questions just to put the ball back in your court even though it is likely you already provided them the information. I will say it has gotten a lot better over the years.

If you aren't very familiar with ServiceNow, I would recommend bringing in a vendor for deployment. They will help you understand the tool and make sure you aren’t boxing yourself in with the way things are built out. The OOB processes ServiceNow offers are all based on ITIL standards so theoretically there aren't a lot of customizations you should need to make up front.

I have worked for a company who used a vendor and did it themselves and now I do it for customers. My biggest piece of advice is don’t just try to make ServiceNow do what your old tool did. Take advantage of the power behind this tool!

This isn’t the cheapest solution out there, but is definitely worth it if implemented and used correctly.

I haven’t necessarily used or evaluated other systems, but I have done work with integrating to other solutions and converting users from other solutions to ServiceNow. I will say ServiceNow makes most of these tools like TrackIt or OmniTracker as a few examples look like they are about 20 years behind the game. The biggest struggle is trying to get users to look at ServiceNow and use the tool to really improve their processes instead of just trying to copy the process you used in their old system.

There are a ton of features and capabilities that can be used to automate processes within your organization and have a single source of data and this is an exceptional tool for that. There is always room for improvement and as they try to expand into different markets ,I do think some of the older applications get left behind and aren’t maintained as they should be.

ServiceNow is a great tool and I would highly recommend it. It will give you powerful automation capabilities and can significantly decrease time users have to spend researching and working tickets not matter what department it is.

• Workflows
• Automation
• Integrations

I would say one of the best things on ServiceNow platform is the way how you can quickly automate delivery of services or goods to the end-user.

Reporting capabilities could use some improvement.

I've used it for four years.

It strongly depends on customer awareness of ServiceNow best practices. In some cases stability is an issue.

It strongly depends on customer awareness of ServiceNow best practices. In some cases scalability is an issue.

Depends how big account the customer is for ServiceNow.

I have a few experiences with HPSD. Thick client instead of web application says everything.

ServiceNow comes with a lot of functionality included as baseline implementation. For example, all main ITIL processes are implemented, as well the fact that it is a cloud solution gives you the whole functional system at the beginning.

I am part of vendor team or advising clients in solution architecture area.

The license model is based on a number of fulfillers (active users who play some role within ServiceNow functionality). Therefore, you can serve as many end-users as you want without additional costs.

A strong architect is needed. You should follow best practices and challenge customers. So don’t implement everything right at the moment when you receive requirements.

Find a strong partner with experience of other customers of the same size and nature. Find a parter that will create, together with you, a strategy that will guide you during preparation, all phases of development, and operational times.

The flexibility of the product in regards to configuring and customizing it to meet the company needs within a few clicks.

The ability to quickly customize and configure integrations for a centralized source of information has improved automation capability and overall SLA improvement.

The configuration capabilities of the end-user facing portal, although this issue is due to be addressed in the next release.

I've used it for four years.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

8/10 - the vendor used to be really good, but with the massive growth of product use it’s deteriorated.

4/10 - the vendor used to be really good, but with the massive growth of product use it’s deteriorated.

We previously used BMC Magic, Remedy, and CA ServiceDesk, but their lack of flexibility moved us to ServiceNow

It was very straightforward.

We utilized a ServiceNow partner, and we they were fantastic overall.

It's positive but I don't have anything specific.

It’s higher than most, but the licensing is $X/User/Month, so try to limit the users working tickets. The submission & approval parts do not require licenses.

Ensure you have basic processes in place instead of having the tool guide your process. Within ServiceNow, the saying is “The good and bad side of ServiceNow is that you can do anything.” So while you can customize everything, I recommend streamlining as much as possible.

One stop shop: All requests for support, new items, changes and anything else can be done in the portal, flexibility of service. Requests can be done directly from the portal.

• Your selected platform, for managing and consolidate ITIL Processes, HR, PPM, CSM, and any new enterprise app you want to build on the platform.
• Set of pre-built ITIL processes as well as a platform that can be used to build a variety of custom business applications.
• The process flexibility - it's very easy to customize and build off of.
• Easy to integrate with third-party applications.
• Customized Dashboard as per user requirement.

It's missing monitoring capabilities.

Stability is assured by the vendor. No issues found so far.

Easily scalable as the vendor assumes availability at all times.

Quick, friendly, and efficiently responsive customer support.

Compared to other ITSM platforms, ServiceNow is by far the most agile, robust, and scalable platform.

It was very straightforward and to the point, since it's very intuitive and easy to deploy.

The license model is based on a number of fulfillers (active users who play some role within the ServiceNow functionality). Therefore, you can serve as many end-users as you want, without additional costs.

Integrations: ServiceNow is an open platform that come with out of the box integrations API, but if you really want a deep business process integrations of ServiceNow with JIRA, Salesforce, Microfocus, BMC and others, we recommend https://www.zigiwave.com  read more in the blog post here: https://zigiwave.com/how-to-integrate-jira-servicenow-in-less-than-2-minutes/

The speed of being able to do stuff. Once you know where to put your code, it's very fast to put it somewhere and have it running.

More publications about what plug-ins are available.

I've personally used it for about a year.

There's been very little downtime in the year we've had it. I think we've had one outage that was five minutes or so.

Product-wise, I think it's scalable. The pricing model is a little bit prohibitive for us.

They've been great. I haven't used them much in the year that I've done it. I've only had maybe two incidents logged, but they were great with them.

The community is good most of the time. People will answer questions so it's a pretty good community.

We just did the Fuji to Geneva, and there were a lot of issues. I think it was because we've done a lot of customizations on forms, adding things, and what-not that broke when we moved to Geneva. The other guys who have been there for longer have said it was pretty difficult in comparison to the other upgrades.

It's kind of preventing us from using it on other things because of the licensing model.

It's worth it, but have a good team around you to help you do it right. Having a team has been good to bounce ideas off of, especially when people have been using it in our organization for maybe eight or nine years. There's always someone who knows, "Oh don't do this," or "Do it that way."

The flexibility - we've been able to change it and make it look like our brand, so we have our brand logo on it, etc. We've been able to accommodate a lot of our old customization than we had done in our previous system, we've been able to roll that in, that's some of the niceties with the platform. I think that's one of the biggest advantages for us, is the flexibility to be able to do the dashboards and try to get people more involved in the application rather than running a report.

It allows us to offer a different variety of toolsets for our staff, which our last system was not very flexible in that regard. Allowing my customers to go in and do their own dashboards, write their own reports, change the color of their screens has made them feel more involved and more engaged in the tool. We're seeing more requests for newer things and different things. People are thinking outside the box instead of just thinking inside of it.

As far as the hospital industry, we have not really rolled it out or it's not as big a feature to our external customers right now (the clinicians in the hospital). What we're looking to do though is to provide our outside customers the ability to do more things through the service catalog and have one central location for doing things. We have different systems that do different things, so we can bring them and ServiceNow's platform will allow us to bring all of those items into one spot, so it's a one stop shop. That's what we're looking to do, that's what is best for the hospital.

The training, and that's not the tools, I'm very happy with the tools, it's just I have not been able to get my arms wrapped around it, to be able to do all the multiple things that I want to do. We're still learning it. I was telling someone the other day "I feel like I'm a developer," but then again I'm not really a developer, because I just need that one or two more advanced courses to push me off the edge so that I can get in and do all these great things that people are talking about doing. I just haven't seen that piece.

We did have some performance issues where some of the system areas were slow, but that was really our fault. It was a blip in the lifecycle. I mean comparatively we don't have any downtimes, we've got a hundred percent availability, so we're very happy in that regard. I'm also very happy with their support, they're very engaging and they've been very helpful when we have had problems.

There was a home grown solution as well as an external solution. We had had that solution for over twenty years and it had been through many different partners and many different hands, and it was not very customizable. I think that especially with ServiceNow, it's allowed us to start pushing forward the thought of ITIL within our authority.

That was Service Desk Express. We actually had it when it was Magic Solutions back in 1997, out of Newark, New Jersey. It actually was the lighter version of, it was the smaller offering from BMC.

Ours was very complex. We had several issues because we were not in ITIL shop, and because we were not only changing our tool but really changing the culture of the way we had done things in the past, there was a lot of push back. Having them come in and having ServiceNow's help was good since they did a great job. It wasn't easy, it was kind of a struggle. We did have some issues where we kind of hoped that the vendor that we had brought in to help us with the implementation would tell us what industry standards or best practices were. We didn't see it, we were missing some of those pieces. That made it kind of hard. We also had an executive turnover in the middle of it, so that doesn't help.That hindered our implementation. 

My suggestion to people would be to come and learn about the tool and learn about everything it can do before you make any decisions and before you start your implementation, because if I had to do my implementation over again I would change what I was trying to do. Like we implemented three pieces, or one piece, that really wasn't very helpful and I would have rather have tried something different.

I'd do it. I mean just do it. If you're looking for a flexible tool that's going to grow with you, that's going to expand your flexibility, or expand your team, or expand how you do things and streamline things, I would do it. We've only been on it three years, but we've already done one upgrade, and I was prepared for the worst. I had come into work at midnight, and brought my snacks and sat at the desk and then basically watched the upgrade, and I won't be doing that again. I mean it's just that easy, it really is.