ServiceNow Reviews

We are premium partners with ServiceNow and I'm a solutions architect. 

ServiceNow is one of the fastest‑growing cloud enterprise software companies in the world. We implemented ITSM, ITOM and ITBM for various customs and even in our organization which reduced operations costs infrastructure cost

This solution has a user friendly environment. ServiceNow offers a wide platform which allows us to explore other technologies and functionalities and provides a 360-degree view. Data in reports and dashboards are easily accessible. I also like the integration hub which is plug and play. You can integrate any tool with ServiceNow.

Need to focus on small business like Licensing, packaging

I've been using this solution for 10 years. 

We don't have any complaints from our customers after they start using the product. Once they adapt to the new look and feel, and the user experience, there's no problem. 

We generally don't need much support. When it's necessary, I can contact the higher support team that deal with implementation and it's easy to connect with them and get a quick response. They are good. 

We used Remedy and we switched because Remedy is still using old technology

The initial setup is straightforward in ServiceNow. It's not complex, you can say it's out-of-the-box.

100%

If a company is looking for more accessibility, a user friendly environment where they want to explore other functionalities like HR and CSM, then ServiceNow provides that. I recommend this solution because they're always coming out with new technologies and functionalities. And the support level is very good even though things are automatically updated on a regular basis. 

I rate this solution a ten out of 10. 

ServiceNow is helpdesk software that I have some experience with. This is not a solution that I deploy. Rather, I interact with it using hooks between it and NetBrain.

It is used for the creation and tracking of tickets and incidents, tasks, projects, and self-ordering. Our parent company uses ServiceNow for ordering and it has been utilized with a lot of different workflows. This is something that we never did but now that we've merged together, and we've merged our instances of ServiceNow, it means more of those self-service tech catalogs now in place and utilized.

As an end-user, I have not had any real problems with it. I use the capabilities that I have to and it's one of the tools that I have to use because that is where tickets are presented.

ServiceNow is a very powerful tool that can perform a lot of different functions.

There is inherent complexity with this tool because of the number of things that it can do.

My company has been working with ServiceNow for close to 10 years.

This is a stable solution. There's very little that I'm aware of in terms of hiccups and complaints.

As an end-user, I have not been in contact with technical support.

We did have an on-premises solution until about a year and a half to two years ago, and now we're using the SaaS version. That changes features and then tools, and perhaps other things as well.

ServiceNow is a very powerful tool and with power comes complexity. It's divided up well, and I have experience updating tickets in it. In my opinion, it can do a lot, although some people think that it should do a lot more.

I'm not convinced that it should be the source of truth for everything. Some people promote it as the source of truth, but in networking automation, there are multiple sources of truth. For example, Active Directory is your user source of truth. IPM is your IP source of truth. The ticketing system has access to a lot of things, but does it need to be, and should it be the source of truth for something? I don't think so.

I think that it should pull from other places and be a collection of sources of truth. It's not the source of truth for users, it uses users. It's not the source of truth for devices, as devices are managed elsewhere. However, some people try to force it to you be that source of truth. I think that following such advice can lead to trouble.

Again, it's a very complex system and you can make it do whatever you want. It's just a matter of getting it to react the way you want it to.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

For our company, it would be incident management with the ability to track and report on that. Showing trends and then tying that into problem management as well. Also completing the whole circle, so problem management and change management. Having one system of record that everything is all tied together and you can connect the dots all the way around through the lifecycle.

Being at the help desk, we see trends and incidence from which we can create a problem to track a larger issue because it's effecting more than one user or more than one location for our restaurants. From there, we run down root cause of what's actually causing this problem to happen. Then from that the developers will kick off change requests to permanently fix the problem. But if you don't have the incident management to replace or the ability to report and trend, then you never know that problem's happening because we have a really quick fix that we do all the time. So being able to see that trending and get ahead of the problems and get them out of the environment makes everyone's life easier.

From our perspective, it's the ability to customize it and provide the different platforms. A good example is that within our organization we have incident forms that are tailored to IT and we have incident forms that are tailored to other groups, like accounting supply chain. They're using the exact same incident form, but they're customizing the fields that show up based on their groups so that they get the experience and reporting they need out of the product, but we're all using one system of record and one form to do that in so we can report holistically.

The other part of that is from a customer and restaurant facing standpoint, we can build out those seamless pages, create custom portals for the restaurants, because obviously the IT view or the back end users view is not what a customer wants to experience. It lets us create that front end view for a customer to get what they need and still have that logic to the system for it to flow through and everything.

I think some of the areas for improvement are some of the features that get added sometimes and not a lot of help and resources get devoted to them. A good example is inside of my self-service portal, we use heavily utilizing the wizards that will actually walk users through a guided experience, asking questions, giving responses to lead them where they want to go because in the restaurant industry not everyone wants to fill out forms. They just want to be led by the hand. They're hired to run restaurants, not run computers. So, there's very little documentation on how to use them and how to build them. It's kind of one of the features that got put in but never really expounded upon because it's not been used a lot. So, we really taught ourselves how to use them.

The other one would be what I'm looking at now which is coaching loops. Very little documentation. Very little understanding of how it works. Again, learning it on my own because the book explains this is kind of the fields and what they do, but very little as far as actually using it as available. I would say sometimes they're great features, and they're great additions, but if there's not a lot of user adoption, then not a lot of documentation gets written for them.

We've been on ServiceNow for about four and a half, almost five years, and we've just upgraded to Geneva.

I think the only issue we've had is our recent upgrade to Geneva went a little wonky. But I think that was partially our fault. We had gotten a little bit behind on patching Fuji and then jumped to Geneva Patch 5. I think there was items missed. Even though it should have been cumulative, I think we had some items that were missed in there.

The other issue we had is when we deployed ServiceNow, we started with domain separation. Mostly because the consulting company we used said that's the only way to do it. It probably shouldn't have been done, but that's not a reflection of the product as much as the consultants we used at the time.

We used Altiris. Maintaining Altiris servers was getting very expensive. They were hosted locally. We had a very old version of Altiris. We never kept up with the new version, so it never went to the cloud. So very old, very hard to maintain. The admin we had at the time was retiring. But probably the biggest standpoint was how limited Altiris was. You really could not customize it. If you wanted to build reporting, you had to have a sequel admin do it for you because there was no user interface for reporting. It was the system sped out the sequel queries that it was told to do, but you had to write them in sequel. So, it was not very user friendly.

I think in some ways we probably bit off more than we should have chewed, but we needed the product to replace Altiris. We had to fill that gap because of everything it did. From a stability standpoint, it was probably on the verge of collapse. We had to put a product in place to take it's place.

We worked with ServiceNow directly now, but during the implementation, we found a third party to do it for us. We were involved, but we also relied heavily on that third party consultant because Altiris had been the only thing we knew for so long that this was a complete change. It was our huge step forward.

Don't look at ServiceNow as what it can do for whatever department you're in, but try to get some buy in higher up in the organization because the more foundation and different groups you can get into ServiceNow at the beginning, the easier it is for the adoption. It really can become something for the entire organization. Getting that buy in from the beginning helps it grow a little faster.

If you've got 5 different groups that will be in it from the beginning, then some of the choices you're going to make are going to be a little bit different and they're going to be a little more future planned than, "I just need this for me". So, it's probably the biggest advice I can give is try to plan for the future.

I've seen other products. I've seen some of the stuff that they can do. Really haven't seen one that can, at least in my mind, replace our ServiceNow for everything that we've put into it, everything that we've done. It would be a very hard thing to do.

There's pretty much nothing that I have found yet that I couldn't accomplish within ServiceNow if I wanted to. I think for us, we tried several times to implement a CMDB, a configuration management database, and it failed for various reasons. With ServiceNow, we were able to finally do that. My boss refers to that as the pink unicorn, the mythical creature that did not exist.

We finally made that happen with ServiceNow. I feel that CMDB is actually my license plate.

I think historically we have had a real warrior spirit. We would get in there and do it and sometimes that meant we would write something in house. I think that we would invest a whole lot of time on something, and we would get real attached to it. Then the next thing you knew, you blinked your eyes, and we were behind the times. I think that we've made a giant leap or two in the last year, year and a half or so, that we've been using ServiceNow, that I've been involved with.

Now we have invested the time in the CMDB. We've invested the time in a portal and catalog items and now we're moving towards automation and things. We moved from Eureka to Geneva and now we've got this whole fresh look and all these new features. We're able to stay a lot more current a lot faster because ServiceNow is doing the work to keep the platform updated, whereas we can just continue to provide value that is specific to us and what we're trying to do.

There's some platform code that is compiled and its Java code on the server side. There's no documented API on what the functions and properties are of that code, and we're not able to reflect that code to get it to make our own API. I think some of the platform devs have met with me in the developer hub and said that they are working to provide that because they can see why we'd want it. I'm excited to hear that that gap will get closed soon.

Also, some of the way that the patches would break the catalog and the catalog items would cause unnecessary changes to the lay out in the UI. Like moving a field label from the left to underneath. If you have 30 items on a page, or more, that's going to offset everything. Unnecessary moves and then unnecessary moves back, stuff like that.

It's pretty solid. I think that on our dashboard it says 99.8% availability. Now a lot of my customers in the service desk that do our support line, over the phone or through chat, they're telling me that the CMDB look up for config items on the incoming incidents that they're starting, is way faster in Geneva. They've set it, set it, and reset it. It wasn't just a first impression. It's a lasting, "Thank you. Thank you. Thank you." They sent a special email. We don't normally have people that are raving fans of anything you provide tool wise. We have our customers who are usually raving fans on our airlines. This was kind of surprising to hear.

We add users constantly. We on-board people and they are automatically added. We have a portal that's internal for our users that don't need to do changer class but they do need to request things in the catalog so those people are able to log in and request stuff.

We didn't successfully implement a CMDB. I think different work groups were very siloed and they had the problem of, "Where's our stuff?" They each solved that problem on their own because there was no centralized management database. Some people used spreadsheets. Some people used Wiki Documents or Wiki Documents with spreadsheets in them. Other people just had it in their heads and like, "We'll go ask Jim or go ask Bob. Oh, Bob left. I'm sorry. Go ask Tim. Maybe Bob told Tim before he left." It was like that. What we were able to do was use this as the first product that actually worked. We did try a few other products but we weren't able to get that off the ground. I don't know if that really speaks to those products or if it was the lack of support that we had from our leadership to get it done. I wasn't involved so I don't remember who it was, but I don't believe they were home-grown.

We used a tiered approach. We did like five or six release cycles to get to where we are. We started with CMDB and change management at the same time and I think that that really worked well. When we were working in Remedy, our CMDB only kind of had Oracle database names and host names. Windows or Linux host names and that's it. It was pretty flat and people were used to it and it wasn't a whole lot of information to ask people to put in their change request. When we came over, we were able to stand up change and people were satisfied with just having the host names, which was fairly simple. Then we were able to do kind of a crawl, walk, run, run with scissors sort of thing. I think that it went well.

Come to a user group meeting and we'd love to connect, meet and show you what we've done and talk about where you're at and give you some feedback and advice about what worked, what didn't work, what we thought might work better.

For me it's the development, and in the background it's very easy to manipulate forms, to write simple scripts and to do things. The developer side is very very easy. Because I stress velocity and therefore I can get a lot more work in, because it's so simple, I can maintain my high velocity.

We have 65,000 process users, and it's great. We've used it for ten years or so. We're actually one of the very first adopters of ServiceNow, so we've got a long history with it. The fact that they can do everything that we need to do. For us it's just the amount of stuff that we can put in there and direct people to a single place instead of multiple places.

I always say that I have never been asked to do something in ServiceNow that I couldn't do. They've just released mobile which is an update for the new release, which is a great step in the right direction. The push notification is the way of future, things like system emails and those sort of things are sort of an antiquated way of dealing with the notifications.

I would like to say less of an emphasis on those sort of things and more of emphasis on using ServiceNow as the notifier itself, so as you're logging in, you see the notifications of the things that you need to address then, not to getting spam in your email box. Because what happens invariably, this is the second company that I work for, what people do is they get tired of the ServiceNow emails and they just shove them into a folder and never pay attention to them, and at that point you've completely lost your audience. If there was a better way to get notifications out than email spam, that would be great.

This is my fifth year using it. I'll be entering my sixth in August.

My first instance was a June 2011 instance, and upgrading was a nightmare from that point. It got progressively better. Right now it is flawless, and it takes very little effort to do an upgrade, but getting to that point has been very very difficult. That's probably one of the other things that would be nice for ServiceNow to give us the ability to sort of see all the things that we have changed. Not in the middle of the upgrade, but just ahead of it, so you can try to knock those things out.

We used to have BMC Remedy and we've moved from that. We've consolidated in a single unified place for people to go and do anything IT related that they need to do.

It was easy and straightforward. It's a web-based app essentially, so you get loaded onto a server, and we have twenty-four node cluster in one node. We're on primus and have 65,000 process users going to it. It's relatively easy, as far as getting it up and going and just turning the monitors on and letting people enter.

First, I'd tell you to do it. I've been on four or five separate ITSM systems and ServiceNow has been the best. I've used Remedy, Vantive, and Autotask, and none of them come close to the ease of use and development that ServiceNow has.

I would tell you to step away sort of like as an architecture, because you can do a lot of things on servers now that wind up being dirty data or just technical death. Just be very true, with whatever you're doing, think about it, write it down, then implement it, that sort of thing.

I love it, I love the platform. In fact, I view my job as sort of not trying to put people out of the job. We need to consolidate, we have thousands of tools all over the place, we need to consolidate all those things and I'm very strong at let's consolidate it in ServiceNow, and get rid of all of the sort of money that we are throwing at things.

The solution is being used for our ticketing system.

It is user-friendly and simple to use. 

The solution could be made cheaper. Machine learning and artificial intelligence should be introduced in the next release. 

I have been using ServiceNow for two years. 

The scalability of the solution is good. Presently, ten thousand users are using the solution. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

The initial setup is easy. The deployment was done within a month. 

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

We use ServiceNow mostly for our IT ticketing business. Recently we set up the Request portion of ServiceNow and we're using it as well.

It enables us to interact with our end users and helps us resolve whatever incident they might be having. We get incident reports and it helps us get set up with trends so that we'll get resolutions to those incidents.

I like the reporting aspect of it. It helps us know where we stand regarding the types of issues we're receiving, the types of incidents that come in.

It also shows us trends. That enables us to possibly predict an issue that might come up in the future as well as what is happening right now. We like that feature. With it, we can either avoid certain issues or know where we need to focus more regarding the service we provide.

I would like the reporting aspect to be better, including the graphs. It could have some way for us to easily to export to a csv or spreadsheet so that if a graph cannot be provided by ServiceNow itself, we would be able to use other applications to create them.

Also, if there was a feature that enabled us to interact with end users directly within ServiceNow, like an instant-messaging type of feature, that would be great. 

Another nice feature would be a way to easily to assign tickets and incidents to the techs who will be working on them. That could be better. Other than that, the system seems to be working just fine.

We've had no issues with the stability of the solution.

We are okay with the scalability.

I would rate technical support at seven or eight out of ten. They are pretty much on time. They're willing to help.

When I started with the company, we outsourced our issues. When we brought IT in-house, ServiceNow was the first system we used.

The setup was straightforward, easily understandable with the training we did. There might have been some kinks but everything was worked out in due time. It was fine.

There were a few other options we evaluated but I don't remember the specific product names.

Learn anything you need to know direclty from ServiceNow. It's a good product. I can't really knock it. Go ahead and give it a try. As long as it fits your environment, I think it's a fine product.

I would rate ServiceNow at seven out of ten. I would like to see a little more automation. It may just be the type of license we have which doesn't give us full automation, but that would be one of the things that I would like in ServiceNow. That would make things easier for both the techs and the end users. In addition, I would like to see a better workflow setup within ServiceNow.

We use it as a tool to develop and monitor attestations and assessments where we develop questions based on our policies and ask application owners to explain and show compliance with our policies through a series of attestation questions.

I refer to it often when I'm looking up applications in the CMDB. The CMDB gives me a lot of information on the application in terms of what certain parameters are, who owns the application, and what's the structure of the organization owning the application. It gives me a fair amount of information.

We are using the latest version. We stay up to date with all the patches.

It helps with how well our applications are compliant with our policies, and that helps with the overall security of our applications. We are very detailed with our policies, and there is a buy-in for security across the company. So, we're able to show which applications are in compliance with the policies and which aren't, and we're able to target those that aren't for a little extra work and attention.

The thing that I like most about it is the easy integration with the CMDB. I'm able to look at the CMDB for applications and develop my assessments and attestations based on the application and point them at that application owner. So, I can really automate the whole thing.

Its setup is tough. It takes a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience.

In terms of features, we're pretty happy with the product as it is. They make regular improvements. We look at them, evaluate them, but we haven't seen anything that we wanted to use it for, though we continuously reevaluate our tools to see where we can expand our capabilities.

I have been using this solution for three years.

We find the product to be very stable. Because it is a cloud-based application, you have your issues with networks and all, but I don't consider that a part of the problem with the application. I find the application to be extremely stable.

It is fairly easy to scale. When you start adding a lot of different modules to it, it becomes a bit more complex, but if you have well-trained staff who can manage it in production, it becomes relatively simple, especially once you develop processes to handle that.

In terms of usage, just about everybody in the company uses it. If you're in technology or you're using technology, you use the interface with this application one way or the other. This is the company's ITIL tool. This is how we handle requests and manage the integrity of our systems and applications. I think it's going to be here for a while. How long? I can't tell.

Tech support is very knowledgeable. We've used them, and they've been very helpful. If someone is starting with ServiceNow, I would recommend them to spend a fair amount of time with their tech support. However, they do tend to point you towards some of their vendors who provide consulting services, and as with most consulting services, it can be all over the place.

We were using another solution. It was the standard for service management for so many years, but it was horrible. I don't remember the name.

The setup is tough. It takes a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience. So, you have to basically work with the product on an almost exclusive basis to become very knowledgeable. However, it is very powerful, especially once you have people who can write JavaScript and who can improve and make the product do a lot more than it does coming out of the box.

We have operations staff that handles the ongoing maintenance. It's not anything where we're having to pull down servers or anything. It's just managing access and maintaining the integrity of the CMDB. Everything else is just types of ITIL efforts such as handling tickets, processing requests. That's it. I find it very useful.

I cannot speak for the company in terms of what the company sees. All I can say is that from what I've used it for, it has been extremely valuable because I don't have to go around with spreadsheets to people. So to me, it is a return on efficiency.

For the modules we use, we found it competitive. I can't think of any costs in addition to the licensing fees.

My advice would be to look at it very carefully. It is a great product, but make sure that it fits your company culture and the way you want to do things because it is a big product.

I would rate it a nine out of 10.