What needs improvement with ServiceNow CMDB?

I don't currently see any problems with ServiceNow CMDB since everything works fine. If I click on some particular CIs at the moment, all the information related to that CI appears by default. Right now, if there is something in our company we need to generate with the report, we can click on any of the searches for CI options, and all the relevant and recent incidents, changes, or anything that has happened should come on to at the bottom of the list displayed by the tool, which would be nice. If you select any CI, the associated applications with that CI should also be made available for users since, currently, the tool lacks such a feature.

In terms of potential improvements, while I haven't encountered significant issues in my experience, I believe there could be room for enhancing customization capabilities. Specifically, expanding the rules for customizations could be beneficial. It might be valuable to grant certain permissions to power users, who fall between regular users and administrators. This would help distribute the workload and empower users to make minor modifications without overburdening the administrators with every small change.

The discovery process and service mapping could be improved. I prefer a more comprehensive approach to discovery and simplified service modeling. Technical support has room for improvement.

While ServiceNow CMDB is flexible and comprehensive, it's also difficult to implement and requires a lot of customization. In order to fully leverage ServiceNow CMDB, you need ServiceNow Discovery and some other ServiceNow solutions. It's expensive to purchase all of these. We're negotiating with ServiceNow, but we're thinking about replacing it with another CMDB solution.

We have various service levels and SLAs for our customers like platinum, gold, etc. Each SLA has an associated hardware and computing configuration. We cannot define that in ServiceNow for each customer. For example, a customer with 100 servers might be in the platinum category while a client with 25 would be in gold. We use Terraform for infrastructure automation on the cloud. The logical mapping in ServiceNow needs to be improved. The logical mapping is limited to the OS layer. I installed a database and one application on top of that.

The reporting function could be more advanced and has room for improvement. The reporting should have additional visuals, graphs, and bar charts. The reporting dashboard needs to be more user-friendly and support online reporting. Features insights and artificial intelligence are indigenous. However, ServiceNow does not have an AI model, so there should be voice support and a voice ticket logging mechanism, so people can see that a server is not functioning and provide a description of the issue. ServiceNow should still log the ticket, even if the server has been down for a long time. I would like to have AI support added to the next release.

Integration is complicated and requires advance scripting and customization to complete it. It would be good to have the ability to customize the UI.

I'm still learning about CMDB's capabilities, so I haven't seen anything that I want added yet.

Definitely, the price needs to be lower because there are clients that I work with who cannot afford ServiceNow. I have to end up proposing alternate solutions to fit their budget.

All areas of the solution have room for improvement. I mean, it's a never-ending thing, everything's being improved all the time. Because I'm an SME, the most important thing is the technical help that I can get, so better, more useful technical support would be good. I also think the solution would be better if it was more intuitive.

An area for improvement in ServiceNow is the reporting because there are reporting features that would be better when done within the platform, rather than having to buy the performance analytics model. There is a greater difference between the dashboarding that you can do from the platform versus what's on the performance analytics model. Some of the features currently available within performance analytics would be good to have within the platform because sometimes, customers will say that the tool is okay, but it's not enough, so you'll need to go with the performance analytics model, and that's costly. The problem is that paying extra for performance analytics costs too much for what it can give back. Customers don't need the entire functionality delivered by performance analytics, but the default functionalities within the platform are not enough. There is always a trade-off. Customers are not getting value for money paid for the performance analytics model because they don't use the whole set of functionalities, and that is the problem. For the time being, there isn't an additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of the tool.

We do some of the programming for the queries and tables, and maybe some of that could be out of the box. I wish we didn't have to pay for additional modules. For example, the vulnerability module is at an additional cost so that we can pull the Qualys scans and actually have automated tickets involved. If that workflow can also be part of that, it would be nice. It would be good if there's a logic that we've already closed or for which we've mitigated the vulnerability that it would automatically close an incident ticket. We still have to put logic to and build some programming or code for this at present.

There are areas that could be improved, but that's a longer discussion. It all depends on what you are looking to do with it and then it becomes an issue of how do you configure the CMDB accordingly. If I were to make one set of suggestions it would be how we defined deployments which would link back to instantiations. Deployments would need to handle varying degrees of customization and granularity that integrate with Application Services and Business Applications.

There is some customization we need from the customer side. In some cases, we are having issues. I can say one experience I had on the VMware side when we are using the change management we had to select from the VMware CI in the change management configuration items. A while back, we were having some issues with modifications and we tried to reach out to support and ServiceNow. They have some limitations on helping us. Apart from that, everything was allowed in terms of us modifying based on the requirements from the customers.

There's room for improvement in terms of integration. When we integrate a customer's foundational data, we get the core of their business from the integration. Because the process is not done through scripting, getting elected in the administrative solution can have value. But with ServiceNow, there is sometimes an added risk for the workflow in the activity.

They can improve the mobile application and the TGO tool, which is a built-in tool for development and implementation. As a developer, it is very frustrating to configure or customize the mobile app. In my opinion, this part of the application needs full rework and re-engineering.

When running large queries within the system, it does have a tendency to bog down the system. This is something that should be improved. I would also like to see the HAM Pro module beefed up a little bit and integrated better into the SAM Pro module, which seems to be pretty much on the roadmap. Its pricing is pretty complicated and always fluctuating. Its pricing should be improved.

There are costly changes here and there. For example, it becomes difficult for us to identify the volume of patents. What we do is we fundamentally de-market and compare against the best and to another product that we were using before, which had some features that we didn't. For example, we use BMC Discovery. BMC Discovery has heaps of patents written using the TPL. BMC Discovery is a primitive tool and it's been in the market for a while. You would expect a lot more packages to be there. In ServiceNow, we are not there yet. It's less mature. There should be a few more classes here and there. For example, there are people who keep talking about Apple devices. They need to be taken into account, and they are not. Sometimes, we have certain rules and regulations of CIs and how we can pick up only those CIs which are operational to a change and describe non-operational ones. When you work with load balancers, when they're off, they obviously go into a non-operational mode. We, from a process side, need to understand certain areas where we need to blend in. I would think that, for example, Network Gear would be a separate class under the config item parent. However, now, it's come under the hardware. That makes sense. I see the table called serial number that should be a lot more efficient and maybe that's the way we have configured it. That's where we are doing a shabby job - our duplication rules were on the serial number and the serial number table. The serial number table itself is a volatile table that keeps fluctuating from time to time. Things like that have to be eventually delivered. They keep coming, they keep coming. I don't think there are any pain points. It's just that we love to understand from a process perspective where we need to rectify ourselves. The tool is made a little differently and we need to figure it out. Our process cannot be stubborn and say the tool has to blend with the process. As an organization, we are very strong in our process. We expect the tool to cater to us whenever we tweak things and mess them up. However, when you tweak something, you need to be able to go in and clean it up and not think it will sort itself out. You need to put a patch. However, if you put a patch on a patch on a patch you've entirely screwed up the tool. The tool has given you the provision to do the customization, however, you need to be strategic about what you do. You need to be careful in terms of writing. When you say SCCM is a secondary source of truth, for example, you need to be sure what activities you want from there. If you have multiple tools that are going to ingest data into the CMDB, you need to be careful of what rules we write to ensure that they fall in place.

There are some gaps in the technologies that can be solved. Operational technology isn't quite 100% there yet, but I hear it is on the roadmap. I would also like it to be cheaper.

Within the CMDB and managing the assets, ServiceNow works really well. However, it needs to integrate with other toolsets, such as scanning tools. That way, you can bulk upload and bulk transfer assets between sort location and sort location. The E2E solution has a huge dependency on scanning tools and ServiceNow lacks integration with scanning tools. That is actually one of the biggest challenges. I would like to see them partner with some key scanning technology companies to give them a real end-to-end offering.

You need to perform additional planning because their recommendation is not to add columns to the core tables. Their recommendation is always to add related lists, which is the best route to go. From an improvement standpoint, I like it because it can even maintain your upgrade pattern, but in some cases that may not be applicable. From a processing standpoint, a development standpoint, their processes of building the related lists is okay. It can be done right now; you just have to kind of think forward and you should make sure that people do it that way. Every interface goes through updates and modifications. So right now, ServiceNow overall, in regards to having multiple screens open at the same time, you can do it, but if you try to go back, it loses its reference point as it uses a browser-based model as opposed to a tab-based model — it's window-based in other words.