ServiceNow Reviews

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.

I previously used the on-premise version of ServiceNow. It was a better fit for companies and banks because of their tech security protocols. But for my work with my current company, I am considering the cloud solution because we already have all the other software components in AWS.

The main features of ServiceNow that I use are incident approval management and the ability to link all the information we receive from the finance bureau service. We needed to track the different processes within the IT area and incident documentation. Then we gathered all the information and built a knowledge base. That's the central core functionality that I've been using, and I've seen immense benefits.

We are elaborating and defining the business processes, so I will believe that we will be able to avoid the older models for the second phase. But first, I wanted to have these incident and asset management models in place as a first phase of the implementation.

I've been using ServiceNow for work I've done with various clients for around eight years. I first used it with Wal-Mart International, and then we used it for one event with Brolin Management. I recently worked with Santander Bank, where we used ServiceNow for all the incident and assets management. Now, I help implement different service management tools at my current company, including ServiceNow.

I think ServiceNow is highly stable. These kinds of tools are used in a big company, and I haven't seen any issues in terms of the core platform. However, if we need to customize something, that would be the point to focus on because this would be something new, not a part of the standard flow for the tool.

I think ServiceNow is scalable in the short term. 

The solution has some built-in monitoring capabilities, so we escalate cases as they come. But sometimes the response to our requests is delayed.

Setting up ServiceNow is pretty standard because we want it to manage incidents and use it for other marketing, construction, and procurement areas. But, still, everything would be based on the different services we provide for their operations area. If you move forward with the cloud, I think the number of internal staff needed would be minor. It probably takes around two people to deploy and manage. In this case, we use some external consultants for all the development and maintenance.

For us, it's better to pay the licenses monthly, and I mean when we move ahead with the cloud deployment. I understand that the service includes hosting and licensing as a service as well as some downgoing costs probably. That will be all on the implementation side. It depends if we need some customization. We will need to consider that part as a consultancy. 

I will rate ServiceNow nine out of 10 because it's a little expensive compared to other tools, but it's a very good product from a technical standpoint.

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.

We use this solution for managing IT assets and business operations.

We are also using it to help make better business decisions.

Using ServiceNow has forced conversations around the whole IT domain, on how we can manage the IT assets through their life cycles. This starts with identifying the need and introducing it, developing it, and deploying it, to then eventually making decisions to remove the asset from the operation.

I can use it to see the whole life cycle.

As a company, it's about how you get your data in there and manage it.

I like all of the operations and features that I have seen.

I like that it's running on a unified platform and that there is no data integration.

I can get a real-time view of how our assets are performing.

I also like that with the operations running on a unified platform, I can then get a better picture of ITHealth through the application platform management tool.

I really like what they've done with their common service data model because now I can make a connection between the business process and technology. I can start showing the role some of the technologies are playing and talk about the health of the technology and even connecting it up to the business strategies. You can do that with the APM component.

I like having one platform to get that view.

The marketing needs improvement. This platform can really do a lot and I don't think they do it justice for what it can do. 

I have to go out there and market things. Whereas I think if their teams were a little more in tune with what they could actually deliver, they would do a better job selling it.

I still haven't seen a holistic picture of the whole platform and what they can really do. I don't know if that's intentional or if they're not selling it.

The visuals are the one area where there is opportunity for improvement. 

The reporting can be difficult, but they are making it a little easier to create reports or introduce a wizard to help you walk through them.

You have to know the entity-relationship diagram to get the right data and make the right connections. 

The visual representation of the data is an area where they fall short of, but they do have a partner who is native to their product. It does a much better job visualizing the data. I don't know if that is there, the way they're closing the gap.

I would like to see, from a business process automation perspective, where an engineer or architect could implement the automation. You don't have to write the spec and hand it off to a ServiceNow developer.

For some of the things that are happening with the other BPM tools, I'd like to see ServiceNow be a little more user-friendly. Another thing I'd like to see is that they have a representation and their service taxonomy of a more modern application for events business logic, as well as APIs. As it is now, it's still in the application and infrastructure perspective, but that's not totally a modern construction of an application.

I have been using ServiceNow for 12 years.

We are running the current version. 

From a SaaS perspective, it's very stable. I think in the 12 years that I've been running it, I have seen maybe one or two outages. For the most part, it's pretty stable.

I haven't really experienced any performance problems. I am assuming that they are monitoring and extending it when they need to.

I don't know how many users they have at my current company. In my last company, we had more than 1,000 users. They were primarily IT except for the work request part of it that came in from the entire enterprise.

It is being used extensively. There are definitely plans it increase the usage. I am working on the plans to extend it. It was just introduced in March, more for the kind of IT service side of it. Problems, incidents, change, and work requests for example. 

Now I am looking to bring in governance, risk, and compliance. 

Also, having conversations with other areas like business continuity, disaster recovery, and security about how they could leverage the same platform for some of their operations.

I think whoever purchased it had this in their vision, they're just not communicating who's vision right now. I have been having those conversations to get people to understand what we will be able to do in the future so that they buy into making the move and investing in learning how to use ServiceNow.

I wasn't on the support team. I am on the architecture team, but as far as technical insights go, and to help make decisions, they have been very good at sharing knowledge. 

I have a couple of connections right now who, as I'm trying to push things out a little bit more, I'm pinging. I am getting help with enterprise ERDs and different things, and they're very responsive to them.

I was not involved in the setup of this solution. It was already in place when I started with the company.

To others who are interested in implementing ServiceNow, I would say, consider it for running your IT operations, but implement it capability by capability. This will allow you to see the big picture of what you're going to get at the end of it. You can't do a big bang approach on this. Rather, you have to be very deliberate in how you implement it.

They have thought through it, and not just the whole domain in the platform but now they have connected it to the business side, the business needs and the processes, the work that people do down to the technology. I think that was missing a few years ago, probably more than a few years ago. Because I think they met with them in 2016 around it. But they have got that now, and it is really powerful. 

I've been working through the taxonomy with different parts of the organization and the fact that they can start making some of these connections in a system I think is phenomenal.

Also, they have the assets included. When you do an assessment to see, how healthy it is, you can not only see who has impacted the business applications that are impacted, which drives you to the people and the processes and all those things. You can also see what the root cause of the cross problem is, and manage the root cause in a more holistic manner.

For its space and what it is capable of doing, I would rate ServiceNow a nine out of ten.