What needs improvement with ServiceNow Discovery?

The continuous improvement in the quality and customization of the product features would be beneficial, particularly as more customers rely heavily on its capabilities.

I believe there is room for improvement in ServiceNow Discovery, particularly in providing more detailed information about network usage and communication between ServiceNow and the infrastructure. This improvement would enhance the overall effectiveness of the tool.

Pricing could be improved to better accommodate various customer needs and business models. It ultimately depends on the specific requirements and budget constraints of each customer.

On the patent side, my company faced some issues with ServiceNow Discovery. In the subsequent releases of the product, ServiceNow promptly addressed the patent-related issues in the tool. More utilization of AI in ServiceNow Discovery can really help our company. Though it may be a very high-level area, I feel AI's functionalities can be leveraged effectively for ServiceNow Discovery. Instead of AI, even GenAI should be introduced in ServiceNow Discovery.

ServiceNow Discovery has an area for improvement, particularly concerning its global deployment in a company with data centers worldwide. The current limitation requires having mid servers or discovery servers in each data center for proper discovery, hindering the ability to discover assets across continents such as Asia Pacific and Europe. BMC Discovery allows for global discovery with only a few servers.

The current limitation in out-of-the-box features, particularly for fields in tables like servers or laptops, necessitates time-consuming customization through pattern matching involving coding. A more beneficial approach would be to have additional features in the default configuration for easily adding different sets of fields. The manual pattern-matching process is not only time-consuming but also presents challenges during system upgrades, demanding revisits to ensure compatibility.

There is room for improvement in the licensing model. In future releases, I would like to see more AI-oriented enhancements in the solution. It would automate most of the things that we have to do manually write the scripts and go on the teleservice, what to do. So if we have something in place and if we can train the module, then AI would be a good thing.

ServiceNow Discovery should improve its cloud capabilities.

I find it valuable to enhance IP address management. I've been in this field since around 2011, and my experience since then has revolved around automation, deployment, distribution, and comprehensive inventory management, all crucial for deploying various components, including patches. When we talk about patch management or vulnerability management, it's more complex than just applying patches; sometimes, you need to undergo significant upgrades or phase out old components for new ones, and this can turn into a substantial project, explaining why vulnerabilities persist. Now, the role of ServiceNow Discovery and security operations, or at one point, looking at vulnerability management in ServiceNow Discovery, is crucial. It allows you to identify vulnerabilities on assets and, with the addition of discovery, service mapping, and event management, you gain a business context for these vulnerabilities. It's not merely about knowing they exist on a server; it's about understanding which services are responsible for critical business processes or transactions, like payroll. This knowledge changes the approach and execution of vulnerability remediation.

ServiceNow has a constant development environment. Hence they get constant bugs which result in incorrect performance. It should also improve customer service.

We can push some generative AI content to make ServiceNow Discovery more effective, but it's just a random thought. There are no particular use cases because of which the aforementioned changes need to be incorporated in ServiceNow Discovery. Debugging is a bit tough in ServiceNow Discovery, so debugging should be made very easy. Debugging should be made easy while developing the debugging pattern in ServiceNow Discovery.

The product could improve some of the visualization and architecture setups.

We would like more flexibility with the licensing. Discovery is bundled with ServiceNow's ITOM license. It was more affordable when it was sold separately, but we bought a package license to get more functionality out of the CMDB. We'd prefer to buy only the pieces we need instead of taking things we don't want or solutions that aren't yet mature enough to use.

In a few instances, ServiceNow has failed to discover some basic things. Some other tools are better at network discovery than ServiceNow. I'm not talking about database servers or any other infrastructure—only networking. Cloud discovery could also be better.

ServiceNow Discovery could improve the interface. The navigation bar could improve. It would be helpful to have a landing page to go to find all the elements in one place.

The solution should improve the classes of discovery assets to disregard more junk data. The most painful task is eliminating the 70% of junk data. Currently, you can define classes of configuration items to discover, but the process is very limited so it still picks up a lot of junk data.

The price could be lower.

ServiceNow Discovery has matured since the last time I got on the bandwagon, but its integration with legacy apps is one area for improvement. Right now, the ServiceNow Discovery APIs cater more to newer apps, whether the apps run on AWS or Azure, and it's much easier on more recent apps versus on-premises apps that don't necessarily have the proper API interfaces, such as REST or JSON. You need to do a lot of manual work to properly integrate ServiceNow Discovery with legacy apps compared to integrating it with newer apps. ServiceNow Discovery isn't a plug-and-play solution, which is another area for improvement, as that causes a delay in the overall process. Making it a plug-and-play product is helpful. ServiceNow Discovery offers out-of-the-box reports, and though that's okay, allowing easier report customization would improve the solution. Currently, customizing reports isn't as straightforward as some of the other tools in the market. It's challenging to build custom reports in ServiceNow Discovery. You can use the basic reports offered in the solution, but if you need analytics and more advanced reporting, there's a lot of work to be done. The product also lacks training resources, which is another area for improvement. It would be very helpful if ServiceNow included some advanced training with the sale. Most team members have to either go online and search on Google for more advanced training. There's no issue with the basics as they're straightforward, but the white papers don't necessarily come with very good use cases of how someone has implemented an intelligent workflow. If ServiceNow could provide more ServiceNow Discovery videos, certification, or cheat sheets to make the overall implementation and configuration of the solution faster, it would be quite useful. An additional feature I want to be added to ServiceNow Discovery is an integration studio that helps you map into legacy apps. It should be drag-and-drop and very visual. I also want the ServiceNow Discovery pricing model to be more of a pay-as-you-use. The challenge right now is whether it's a subscription or whether it's perpetual. The licensing model costs a whole lot more than other solutions, so even though my company uses a public cloud to run ServiceNow Discovery, that doesn't mean you can enjoy the same benefits, and whether you use it more or use it less, you incur the same costs, which is not necessarily a more accurate positioning of how the overall business works for a particular year. Cost-wise, ServiceNow Discovery seems to be from an era where it is more on-premise than sitting on the cloud, even though it is a cloud solution. ServiceNow should have a pay-per-use licensing model so that if my usage increases, I can pay more, rather than needing to pay the same amount whether my usage increases or decreases.

The solution too high priced.

Between SolarWinds and ServiceNow, there is some communication gap. SolarWinds is able to give infra-related things, however, from a ServiceNow perspective, it'll discover all the things from an IT management perspective in real-time. If you're integrating both tools, it's not going to integrate. If I'm using SolarWinds Discovery and if I'm integrating it with ServiceNow, in ServiceNow, I cannot get a direct fit. I need to manually play with it. While they function together, we still need to do manual interventions. ServiceNow is very costly. You need to recruit some developer support if you want to do some coding, and that is the one improvement area they need to look at. They should add in infra monitoring.

ServiceNow is agentless. This has advantages if you're not utilizing the CPU space of the machines you are discovering. However, the downside is that you always have to discuss logging into servers. It also requires credentials and figuring out where to store them, so an agent solution is likely easier because you only have the credential issue when installing it. After that, you are always in direct contact with your devices. This is also true for cloud because it tends to be immutable once deployed, and an agent makes it much easier to get on those devices. I believe ServiceNow is planning to add an agent, but it does not have that feature today. Regarding additional features, I believe ServiceNow is planning an introduction in more countries and adding service mapping, which goes beyond the discovery. The addition will try logging into a machine and discovering what connections one node has to another node or a database. Based on that, it will update the connections in the CMDB. So rather than observing the infrastructure and CIs, it observes the services. That will be another part of a separate contract.

It's an expensive platform. In terms of features, it's pretty functional. You could always tweak it, but I don't have any problem with it. I don't find it to be at a disadvantage compared to something like SCCM, Intune, or any other tool that can do discoveries.

Application discovery could be improved. Right now, ServiceNow needs to be coupled with another solution in order to verify the information.

When you switch versions, for example, when you go from Paris to Quebec they will introduce many new things and occasionally things break when they do that. You usually find out after the fact when you stumble into it. I currently have an issue that we just stumbled into, where our bucket wasn't populating correctly from my own Google cloud. They're trying to figure out how to fix that. They should include support for Google Cloud.

The solution lacks the capability of discovering the devices which are not in the network. That is an area where they could improve upon. In the next release, we are actually looking for a solution for the devices which don't come into the network. Nowadays, because of this pandemic, most of the users are logging in from home, and we don't have any way to discover those assets. We are looking for a solution that can help us to discover those kinds of user devices. During the initial setup, we get some errors and the solution doesn't exactly understand what they mean or how to fix them. They need to have more of an explanation so that we can accurately go about fixing the errors as they arise. Technical support has not been helpful when we have come across problems. They take too long to respond and then don't provide helpful information.

On the Software Asset Management part of it, I expect additional reconciliation and Discovery features there.

They can expand on the plugins for some of the other tools. In the next release, they can automate some of the workflows similar to what they have with TAM Pro. With the integration, they can include some of the commonly used tools such as SCCM. They can benefit from bringing in other tools for their workflows. We are hoping that they explore or leverage some of their existing tools such as Tanium for the purposes of discovery and monitoring.

The solution needs to improve the cost of the solution. There are a few different solutions and they do act the same and have the same types of capabilities, however, the cost is quite high.

In terms of improvement, I would like for it to be possible to use without coding. I would like dropdown ootion so that every customer can modify easily as per requirements and can understand it. They shouldn't need to learn Java or another scripting.

The patterns are the biggest area where improvement could be made. If there's no pattern for application X, then you can't discover that particular application. That is a drawback of the product. ServiceNow gives the URL or specifies an application they can discover and devices they can discover. But if the customer has something else, then it's a challenge. One of my customers had an NAS device and it couldn't discover it. If you don't have the back end of ServiceNow, then unfortunately it doesn't work. None of this applies to iPhones. ServiceNow claims it can discover iPhones but the data is very limited. It's really not applicable.

The service mapping component is less developed than it is in other solutions, and is in need of improvement. For example, BMC uses a more sophisticated mechanism to make the link between the services and the infrastructure. This solution is a little more difficult to manage because you have two CMDBs.