ServiceNow Discovery Reviews

We primarily use the solution for consolidating all the CIs and to make sure we've discovered all the network devices, servers, etc. It helps us maintain what we have and actually pulls all the information together horizontally and vertically in order to create a data model. We throw it into the CMDB where we can import the information and assign CIs for optimal IT operations. We use that probably twice a year, depending upon how much the changes are happening on the data center.

From the ideal perspective, IT operations actually enhance your operational functionality and give you insights into the health and visibility of your IT platforms on a daily basis. You can pull reports in 24-hour increments to take a look at physical instances and capacity issues. 

In ServiceNow this is ITSM and there's ITIL. So far, we've found that ITSM is the most popular. 

The ability to pull reports to check the health of the IT platforms is quite useful. You can pull reports daily to look at everything from capacity issues to physical instances.

The service mapping is excellent.

The maturity of the solution is very good. We're driving our customers to obtain that level of maturity in their own IT space.

The process involving the original setup of the solution is excellent.

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.

I've been using the solution for three and a half years now.

The solution has very good stability. I don't recall witnessing many bugs or glitches on the product. It doesn't crash. It's reliable overall.

The solution is very scalable. A company wouldn't have any problems expanding if it needed to.

We have about 96,000 people in our organization.

I am a solutions consultant and a Discovery certified professional, so I could troubleshoot any issues myself if I needed to. With that being the case, I don't really need to reach out to technical support, so I can't speak to the quality of service.

I've worked on EMC extensively as well. We have used other tools. However, we use Discovery extensively.

Service Now has a great drag and drop functionality, which makes it easier to use, than, say EMC. It's dedicated itself to designing an easy to use tool for IT defense. I understand EMC is coming out with a new tool that rivals Service Now, however, in general, Service Now's tool gives users better leverage.

The initial setup is pretty good. It's what differentiates it from the competition.

The solution is quite expensive.

We have evaluated other services in the past, including EMC.

We're partners with the solution.

I would recommend the solution to other organizations. If you are already using Service Now products, Discover makes for a good complimenting solution. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We are using ServiceNow Discovery for integration and we are populating the CMDB to use it for our ITSM.

The most valuable feature of ServiceNow Discovery is its performance.

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.

I have been using ServiceNow Discovery for approximately three years.

ServiceNow Discovery is a stable solution.

I rate the scalability of ServiceNow Discovery an eight out of ten.

The scalability of ServiceNow Discovery is good.

We have approximately 5,000. We use the solution continuously in our enterprise-sized organization.

I rate the scalability of ServiceNow Discovery an eight out of ten.

The support from the vendor could improve. When we have an issue we speak to the agent in circles causing delays. There are a lot of unnecessary questions being asked.

I rate the support of ServiceNow Discovery a six out of ten.

Neutral

We did not use another solution prior to ServiceNow Discovery. We were doing everything manually.

The initial setup of ServiceNow Discovery is easy.

I rate the initial setup of ServiceNow Discovery an eight out of ten.

We have seen an ROI using this solution.

ServiceNow Discovery is expensive, but the company has a monopoly and we need to use the solution. We use it because we do not have a choice.

The solution does not require a lot of maintenance. Once the setup is done with schedules it operates well.

I would advise others to test the solution.

I rate ServiceNow Discovery an eight out of ten.

I use the tool for IT change management. 

I am impressed with the tool's incident problem change management. 

The product should improve its customer interface, web interface, and front end. I would like to see the integration of keyboard chat with the solution. 

I have been using the solution for three years. 

I would rate the product's stability an eight out of ten. 

I would rate the product's scalability a seven out of ten. The tool's discovery component was quite difficult to scale up. My company has thousands of users for the solution. We have plans to increase the usage. 

The tool's tech support has a slow response. We have encountered scenarios where there was a lack of response even. They didn't really understand the nature of the problem. 

Neutral

I evaluated the value of the BMC solution and found it to be better. 

The tool's setup was complex. It would rate its setup a six out of ten. The product's overall deployment took two and a half months to complete. We required five staff to complete the deployment process. 

We did the solution's deployment in-house. 

I would rate the product's pricing a six out of ten. We had availed some discount from the standard pricing. Even then, the tool's pricing is expensive. You have to pay some vendor service fees for the product's implementation. 

I would rate the product a seven out of ten. You need to consider the tool's alternatives before choosing the product. 

This is a part of ITOM. We use the product to identify servers and network equipment in our data centers.

To some extent, it has improved the way our organization functions. 

Discovering of network related equipment was an area where we had lot of success with.  This was after we helped identify issues with loopback interfaces and such. 

It is stable. 

Support is okay. 

It does create quite a few duplicate CIs, you need to monitor and clean them up.  

The initial setup is complex. 

We do not need any extra features. 

Printer discovery is limited, Server or Workstation categorization depends on OS, which can lead to wrong labeling. 

I've used the solution for the last two years. 

The solution is stable and reliable. The performance is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

This product is not exactly scalable, or, at least, we haven't really had a chance to test its scalability potential. 

We have about six users on the product in our organization. 

We are only using 40% to 60% of capacity. We are not planning to increase usage. 

Technical support is hit or miss. They can be helpful or not, depending on who you get. 

Neutral

We had a different solution. However, the previous product was not customizable, which is why we switched. 

The solution is complex to set up. It took us nine months to implement the product. 

We need four to six people in order to deploy the solution. 

We did have someone help us with the implementation. 

We have seen ROI to some extent. 

We tend to deal with three-year licenses. I'm not aware of the exact pricing of the product. You do not have to pay for acquiring extra features. 

We're a customer. This solution goes hand in hand with ITOM. 

I'd rate the solution at a six out of ten.

I can't discuss the use cases related to the product since I don't have many projects to deal with in my company that need the use of ServiceNow Discovery.

The out-of-the-box probes and patterns in ServiceNow Discovery are great features.

ServiceNow Discovery is a great tool. ServiceNow Discovery should be updated to provide its users with more out-of-the-box information and attributes to support the routers and switches from Cisco. It would be great if the tool could handle more out-of-the-box functionalities to retrieve the information for routers, especially those from Cisco, including the updated devices.

I have experience with ServiceNow Discovery. My company has a partnership with ServiceNow.

Stability-wise, I feel it is a good product.

I do have experience with other tools similar to ServiceNow Discovery, but I don't remember the names of the tools I used in the past. Compared to the tools I have used previously, ServiceNow Discovery can be considered a useful product if someone wants to use an agentless solution, meaning you don't have to install any agent in your system.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The solution's deployment phase takes around a month to be completed.

I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

Primarily for discovering and managing organizational assets and tools. We maintain the hierarchy of all the assets, and if there are any issues, we can remotely configure them without any problems. So, it's useful for that purpose and a high-level overview.

There were various types of organizations, and we had three types of laptops. We could manage the different model numbers in a hierarchy, and the discovery helped us with IP ranges and network changes.

The most valuable feature is its integration with CMDB, as it collects all the data.

Another best feature for me is the ability to set up MID Serve remotely, which is a really nice addition. With MID Serve, we can do the configuration remotely, which saves us a lot of time and effort.

In my opinion, it's quite slow compared to other tools, like Device42. Also, there are predefined fields in Device42 that are not available in ServiceNow. These are the basic things I think can be improved here.

I have been using this solution for three to four months. 

It is stable and works reliably.

I'd rate the stability at around eight out of ten. It works here. But, there are some hiccups that can be encountered, similar to any other solution.  Overall, it's quite stable.

I would rate the scalability around eight out of ten. It's pretty good, especially considering that ServiceNow Discovery is using MariaDB, which enhances its scalability.

There are more than 15 users using this solution in our organization.

The support is good. The documentation was quite good, and the guided setup makes it extremely easy to use, provided you know the right steps, like creating a directory user, for example.

Positive

I would rate my experience with the initial setup a seven out of ten, with one being difficult and ten being easy to set up. 

We had a team of five to six people working on the deployment. Each person had specific skills required for different tasks, such as service mapping, network setup, and the actual discovery process. Having a diverse skill set in the team proved to be beneficial for completing the work quickly and efficiently.

At the basic level, it took me around a week. However, at the organization level, there were a lot of configurations to be edited, and extensive mapping was required. So, in total, the initial setup took around a month.

To start the deployment, we used a target set that can be installed in the MID Server. From the MID Server, we initiated the discovery process using IP ranges provided by the organization or obtained through their routers. This allowed us to discover all the Configuration Items (CIs). However, we encountered an issue with service mapping, which took some time to resolve.

I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, where one being cheap and ten being expensive. 

My advice would be to familiarize themselves with ServiceNow CMDBs and understand how the discovery process works. ServiceNow CMDB is a crucial table management tool for discovery needs. Also, considering the importance of CMDB health management, incorporating it into the usage would be beneficial.

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

The solution is for all of our infra components.

The solution is straightforward to set up.

It is stable. 

We can scale the solution.

The solution is user-friendly. 

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.

I've been working with the solution for ten years. 

I've never had issues with stability. The solution is reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. Even if it is on-premises, there are no issues. 

The solution is scalable. 

We have escalated questions to support. However, they are more commercial than technical. 

Neutral

I've also worked with SolarWinds for ten years. 

The solution is very simple to set up and implement. It's not overly complex. 

If you are just implementing ServiceNow, it doesn't take too much time. If I'm using their SaaS-based services, it might take two weeks. 

It is an expensive solution. Per licensed user, it may be around $160 to $180. There may be additional models a company needs to buy for ITSM functionality.ITSM will not work independently, and therefore we need other models. 

I'm an end-user and integrator.

We are dealing with the latest version of the solution. 

We're using both cloud and on-premises deployments. 

I'd recommend the solution to other users. 

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use ServiceNow Discovery to update our CMDB and to discover the used software assets. In one flow, we can run all the scripts necessary for ITOM for the CMDB and software asset management.

The CMDB is an important database for the whole organization, not just operationally but increasingly for security. For example, in ServiceNow Discovery, we can find servers or services we were unaware of and stumble on vulnerabilities from those devices. Increasingly, our CMDB is the golden source when that wasn't the case four years ago.

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.

We have been using this solution since 2018, using the platform release of San Diego. It is deployed both on-premises and cloud. We install net servers in any data center we want to discover, and there is also a net server running on AWS.

The stability is good and doesn't increase the load of the to-be-discovered machines. I think it's about 1% and it's not a burden for the owners of the machines. The solution works, and we discover our full network every day.

The solution can be scaled differently, and a new net server can be installed. The net server is the distributed solution for ServiceNow Discovery, so it doesn't discover from the SaaS solution and needs a server that runs in the data center that it needs to operate. So if we need more, we install more net servers and do the work in parallel or depending on the need. We can also install it on half of your Windows machines.

ServiceNow Discovery is used only by the operators of the discovery function, which is limited to a team of five to ten people. However, the result can go into the CMDB, which thousands of people use.

We use three to four people for deployment and maintenance. We currently use this solution to full capacity. The on-premises data centers in the Netherlands are fully discovered, similar to cloud. I believe a couple of data centers are yet to be discovered in Japan or Spain. We have 15 different operating countries, and most of them have their own servers in the data center locally, requiring net servers to be installed in those locations. Some of those countries already have it, and a couple of countries don't, but we can probably expand by another ten to 20 percent.

There are a lot of discussions with ServiceNow because improvements are required with the scripts used to collect the information from servers. We usually discuss the level of detail it brings, ensuring that it discovers all the nodes in a certain IP range when it finds a node and what data it collects.

There is a hotline where you can post your tickets, and ServiceNow responds in an adequate amount of time. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

We were using TOPdesk for service management, and no discovery feature was included, so we didn't proceed with it. ServiceNow Discovery is not the cheapest solution, and the pricing model is based on discovered nodes, so if you discover a lot, it becomes expensive. For public cloud, if you set everything to get to discovery, the public cloud makes the pricing model expensive.

We eventually decided that mixing solutions did not help fulfil our strategy, so we stuck with ServiceNow Discovery. We explored other brands like Device42 and Tanium, but in the end, we didn't use them.

The difficulty in installing ServiceNow Discovery is not different from ServiceNow. The networks tend to be separated from freelance, and they all have firewalls you need to go through. So implementing a solution like ServiceNow Discovery, which is quite intrusive on a data center, you always need to work with security on how to implement it safely and practically. For a lot of products, practicality vs security is always a challenge. Deployment is completed in-house with our engineers.

We have not seen an ROI. It is hard to calculate because the data in the CMDB is not quantifiable. For example, we can't quantify the price for a security incident not being resolved or the price for something that is not in the CMDB. The CMDB must become the center and motor of IT operations which is what we are establishing and trying to do. This all subscribes to running IT as a business.

We have a contracted price, but I am unsure of the exact price. We have a three-year contract, and then we agree on a certain amount of nodes to be discovered. ServiceNow will provide a quote which will then be part of the contract. While the contract is in effect, it is possible to overspend, and then we will have new discussions with ServiceNow.

There are no extra costs, ServiceNow does an evaluation every couple of months, and then they monitor whether we are overconsuming. If we are notified, we will discuss the possible expansion of the contract.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. Regarding advice, I would say don't consider a discovery feature as technology in isolation. Discovery contributes to the configuration goal, which is part of IT service management. It needs to be considered as a whole IT service management, where there is a service management tool, monitoring solutions, and configuration. So if there is an incident, we want to know where the incident occurs and the configuration items. If we monitor and then find something, we want to know what the configuration item is to be able to raise an incident.

I would also advise others not to consider Device42 in isolation if you still need to decide on all the different capabilities. For example, if you have service management already in place and are looking to expand towards discovery, then Device42 is okay. In addition, I wouldn't recommend using ServiceNow for service management and Device42 for the discovery part because there is a benefit in having just one platform with one language.