ServiceNow Reviews

I use ServiceNow for incident management, problem management, change management, and request management.

I have found that sorting and grouping functions are particularly useful.

I find some features are difficult to use. For example, the creation of service catalog forms. Creating service catalog forms could be made easier.

In the next release, I would like to see some of the features and processes made to be simpler to use. For example, creating the service catalog forms, doing the CMDB, and integration with other systems have to be made easier to use.

I have been using this solution for almost two years.

It's a stable product.

This solution is scalable.

In our company, we have approximately 1,000 users. For me, I use it every day.

I rarely engage with technical support. I had a good experience with the one or two tickets that were submitted. They were able to resolve the issues and it was a positive experience.

Previously, I was using Jira. 

Jira is meant for small enterprises and it is much cheaper than ServiceNow. 

ServiceNow is meant for a much larger user base.

I was not a part of the initial setup. By the time I arrived, it had already been set up by someone else.

We have five to eight people with various tasks to maintain this solution.

I believe that they had an integrator to help them set up. That was in 2018. before I joined the company.

The licenses are expensive.

They pay a license fee per user. Jira is much cheaper than ServiceNow.

If I was in a small company with 500 users or less, I would use Jira. If I am in a company with 500 or more users then I would use ServiceNow.

For anyone who wants to start using ServiceNow, they need to ensure that they have the funds to finance it. The licenses are not cheap and they need to have a consultant that can help them to customize the functions or the features they need.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

• Simplicity of Change Manager
• Product based on user experience
• Nuclear integration

The ease of implementing the operational processes gives my clients the ability to streamline their day-to-day operations quickly, and allows huge visibility for managers and decision makers.

All areas.

Five years.

No.

No.

A nine out of 10.

I'm an implementer. I work with several solutions.

Very easy and simple to implement; a third of the time of other solutions.

The first impact for the customer is that it is expensive, but do not forget that it is a solution that includes infrastructure; a single cost, easy to justify.

With ServiceNow, it is difficult to recommend another solution. Only the price might be a reason to suggest other solutions. Ivanti could be a good solution.

It is the best solution in the market.

I think realistically, it helped us better our processes. It forced us into adopting best practices. We were in a bit of a tech island, and so we kind of do our own thing. To get everyone in the same system, behaving the same way, looking at work the same way, it helped bring everyone on the same page and to adopt better ITIL practices.

We're a few generations back, we're on Eureka. We've had some vendors initially help us out. We've been through about four different vendors over the three and a half years. Some of that code has been problematic for us. We're looking to get to the Geneva release. A lot of this social type computing is really interesting to us.

I'm going to a Hackathon today, and I'm looking at a "Like" feature for managers. Often in IT, we're not front and center of projects, we don't get the spotlight. When we do things that keep the system up and running for the users, no one sees that. We want to say, "Well we're doing the work in the system." Our managers can go look at that, like it, high five, that kind of thing. We're looking at that kind of Facebook style, or social media style, view into their work and actually interesting to deep diving into the data and showing what our stats are like.

We just did our three year renewal in January so about three and a half years from implementation to production.

We've never had it go down or connect. Most times people say ServiceNow is down, it's because our network isn't available, so it's typically not us. You can flip the WiFi on your phone and say, "Okay, that's not ServiceNow." It's been really good.

We've been pretty consistent from day one. We've used more and more modules, and as people are getting more comfortable with the platform, we're trying to tie more functionality into it, but it's been reasonable for what we're doing.

It's pretty good. I can say that for some things, obviously you can't know everything and we can't find everything, but they've been doing better and better with that. Usually, when I do ask a question, they're pretty good at saying, "Okay, well here's where to go," or, "Okay, that's legitimate. Here's how to solve it." It's usually within a week or two that our issues can be resolved. If they're not critical, it's reasonable for us.

There's a lot there, it's like Excel. You can go in any which direction and you got two different ways to do it or multiple ways of doing things. It was a steep learning curve for us. We went through a number of vendors until we were able to fish on our own. Now we can go to specific people and then get those targeted information. It's been really good for us to have the user groups, local user groups, the snugs, and pick the brains of other companies who are having the same challenges or working on the same projects we are. Then we can collaborate a little bit and make sure that we're doing what makes sense. It's not just us in our own little sandbox.

Definitely understand a bit about ITIL best practice and what that is. We had a gentleman come in about three months before ServiceNow was brought in. He actually ran a mock help desk scenario with business asking things and with the knowledge base being put in typical back end of the level two support. We played the game several times, reorienting where all the knowledge is, where their work was done, and all of a sudden, I had a bird's eye view of how work should be done. As we were implementing ServiceNow, all the decisions and all the modules we put in place laid out to support that foundation that we'd seen. Whereas our initial approach was let's just put in there blank for like all the systems that we have. We wouldn't have leveraged a lot the best practices and things that we'd seen in the game that would've really helped us out. We would've had to rebuild it after the fact. Really understanding, see where you want to be and then build the tool up from there.

Integration - we started off at ITIL processes, but now we're looking at integrating it with other aspects of our business. We're on-boarding CMDBs so that we know what we have. On the other side of that, we can tie those into those processes that we already have so that we can actually see incidents across which devices or if there were changes made to those devices that correlated back to those incidents and stuff like that.

More out of the box stuff, but then again it's so customizable that you can make it do what you need it to do even if it didn't come with it.

I've used it for a little bit short of a year. My company has used it for four years.

It's been constantly stable. I wouldn't say never any down time, but I would say that we're usually at four nines.

I would say most certainly it's scaleable.

With my interactions with them, I would say that they're really good. I almost never have to escalate anything. It's usually the person that responds to me helps me out pretty quick.

Upgrades can be kind of painful. ServiceNow is a great product because you can do almost anything with it. On the flip side of that, it's kind of horrible because you can do almost anything with it. The more you customize stuff, the more effort there is in upgrading to see what isn't getting upgraded because you've customized it and then to work out what you have to do.

My advice would be to do it, not knowing obviously what their ITIL processes are beforehand. I would say, "Get ready to ride the roller coaster," because, like I said before, you can do almost anything with it, which is also a downfall because when we started we were doing just incident change and problem. Now we're doing incident change, problem, project, self-service portal, CMDB discovery, service mapping, even management. It grows exponentially. You have to try to keep up with all those pieces.

I like the out of the box module processes like the incident problem change. Currently, I think the most powerful features are discovery, orchestration, the business map of the relationships, and building applications for business. The business applications has been in place for a year, and we have new customers, so we want to make business applications not only for IT but for other departments in the company.

With it, I can do everything. I have some questions, requirements, from the customers. I never say to the customer, "I can't do it." That's because I can do everything, so I think only our imagination can be the limit of ServiceNow. Even if something doesn't work now, I know that in the next few months it will.

From the customer perspective, I think the most important aspect is that they know what they're paying for. They pay once a year which makes it easy to plan financially. They know the costs of using ServiceNow, because you don't need extra resources, servers, backups etc. as everything is in the cloud.

From my perspective as a partner, I can do everything with ServiceNow so I don't stress about telling a customer during a meeting that I can do something even if I think I can't. Everything is possible and it's only limited by the imagination of myself and the developers.

I think that it goes too fast sometimes and they have too many releases too often. Sometimes there are bugs, maybe not making it unstable, but we need to change some customer customizations. For example, there are problems with the performance, so if ServiceNow is changing something such as data centers there can be issues. Availability is perfect of this platform. Genius, as I said at the beginning.

The only bugs are related to the configuration, not from the ServiceNow side, but from the partners that are doing something because they don't understand how it works.

It's small issues. Not a big impact for production instances and for the current work.

I worked with HP Service Manager. I know that BMC Remedy is quite similar in functionality to ServiceNow. They are trying to be in the same space but with HP Service Manager, I know there is a problem. For example, my previous company decided to go forward with ServiceNow as it had a service catalog. The Service Catalog functionality wasn't working in HP Service Manager, so they decided to switch to ServiceNow.

It depends. From my perspective, it's easy, I am a system architect, and I think from a customer perspective it's easy as well. I can see a new custom application created in a simpler way, for building applications, etc. but I'm usually only using the basic functionality, which I started to work with at the beginning because it's easier and I know that I can control it. From the user perspective, I can see that they are adding new forms to configure everything.

It's genius and there is no risk from the IT manager perspective. The management team of a company isn't at risk either and the future is always promising.

You can be sure that if you invest in ServiceNow the entire company will be happy. Always have a good partner to develop the instance and everything will be fine. For IT management, it's not risky to experiment with ServiceNow.

I would give it a ten. It's the best, from my perspective, especially compared with the IT systems I've worked with before.

I guess it would be the way incidents are created in ServiceNow. It makes our job a lot easier on the service desk. Another thing would be something we just got which is CG4 which is where we are able to track our inventory as far as laptops, monitors and anything else that might be issued to our, I guess we call them customers, and that's about it so far that I've experienced.

It's very important for us to know where our items are and if somebody leaves the company, we want to make sure we get everything back so that the next person that comes in gets everything that they need, and we've had to sort out other items to purchase and wait for them to get here, which just makes it a lot easier for us.

I guess it all goes back to making our job easier and letting our customers able to let us know what the problem is and we can resolve it as fast as possible, and keep track of all the problems that are going on on a daily basis.

Everything in our system can always use some improvement. Right now I'm working on finding out how duplicate usernames are being created in our ServiceNow instance and that causes problems because we need to assign a ticket to somebody and then it shows two names but they don't know which one to choose so they choose the one that's not active, or it's going to go that person but it's going to go somewhere else, but the other one is the actual one that has the email address and then they get the notifications but the other one doesn't so then they lose the ticket and doesn't know where it is.

I know we've been using it for about three years.

Everything is fine for me.

There are issues sometimes. With the updates, we have a line of code that is probably not compatible with that update so we have to go back and see what line of code needs to be edited so that it works with the new update.

For on-boarding, we pretty much put everything in Active Directory and it just goes over to ServiceNow but we don't like our Human Resources as they don't use ServiceNow. They have their own system so we kind of have to do double the work.

I only joined the company recently, so I don't know if something else was used.

I'm not sure. I wasn't here when they implemented ServiceNow or during the upgrade to Fuji. However, I heard it's pretty easy. The person that did it told me a little bit about it, that she sat down and then just called and was on the phone with ServiceNow. They were going over all the steps and it was maybe a couple of hours and then they did some testing afterwards to make sure that everything was running fine and that's about it.

I would say go for it, because at my other company we had a system called Track-It but nobody ever used it. It wasn't that good, and I don't know if it was cheap or it they just stopped using it altogether, but ServiceNow is really good.

Because I do IT planning and program management, the project portfolio management part is most helpful and useful, but I can also see the integration to other parts of the IT operation as well. I think that's most useful because we are looking from an end-to-end perspective within the IT organization, though we may have different functional teams, but we are working as one team, so it's important that the various operations or processes are tied and integrated into one platform, in one end-to-end process.

I can see a very good product strategy. We see enhancements or enhanced features in each of the releases. I see the roadmap is good and the technology underneath is also good.

During the Knowledge16 conference, I found out more about the IT financial management part, which is important to me because we're trying to do more finance on our IT operations so that we can measure performance. We can also share info with our business shareholders and stakeholders as well. I see those features as really useful when we transform our IT organization into a service organization.

In our region we don't have many choices of implementation partners. At the same time, I don't see that they are as proficient as they are in other regions.

Today we aren't seeing major issues but one of our concern is that it's expensive.

Not at this company, but beforehand I had used Remedy. It is a very traditional IT Service Management tool, basically a help desk, but I think there's a lot more in ServiceNow.

The underlying technology and also the application or customization facility, or the technology behind ServiceNow actually is quite robust and quite agile, which we can make use of to do a release and deliver it quickly.

We're using Deloitte as our implementation partner. They are doing a fantastic job, but they're just one particular resource, one or two that can help us, but in our region, we don't have many choices on partners that are proficient in ServiceNow as well as in IT operations.

We are trying to do it in a phased approach, we want to have the initial system for us, and then we'll use it and improve-enhance it later on. I don't see that we'll have major issues, because our goal is not to have it all in one step, but rather we are evolving our solution.

I do not have particular details, but what I heard from my boss is that it's not a cheap solution, especially when you want to roll out to more people or more colleagues in an organization. That is really a significant factor we're considering because in terms of the cost it's not cheap, so we hesitate. We can see a lot of scalability and expansion possibility in rolling out beyond the IT organization.

The ease of use, as for us it's sort of like Lego. If somebody wants something, if they want some automation, if they want workflow, etc. It's cool that if you can imagine it you can probably build it fairly easily.

It's very, very cost effective. We're able to replace traditional FTE dollars and spend on ServiceNow at a fraction of the cost. I believe when it was initially implemented there was an immediate reduction of one to two people.

I'd like to have an offline mode. For us, we do a lot of workforce management. We've got a lot of guys out in the field in remote locations. Getting them into the system is good, it's beneficial for us. Good forms and get that data in. If they're out on site, they can't access the system.

There were no issues with the deployment.

I think that's one of the key things with that tool is all of those considerations and problems go away.

It's infinitely scalable, we've had no performance issues.

It can be both straightforward or complex. Probably one of the easiest ones that I've done was Greenfield. They didn't have ServiceNow at the time. They only wanted a project management solution. That's it. That was very, very small, very straightforward. Then I did one for a company in Australia called TXA. They do a lot of the television transmission equipment and it was end to end automating ticket creation based on an event log. A very, very bespoke and complicated event log.

It was very particular as there are a lot of concepts very particular to their business. It was very, very interesting but it was incredibly complex. They wanted as much of hands off and let the system sort it out as possible. Most implementations are fairly similar.

Some advice that I've heard -  get people hands on with it as early as possible. I find a I go through requirements with a user or with a company that they get, and they'll think that it's solid. As soon as they start playing with ServiceNow they realize "hang on, maybe I can get it to do this, I can change this. "The requirements just completely change.

I think it's excellent in all of the ways that software can be. The only negative that I've got is the one that I said before which is half negative, half positive. That it's being developed so quickly.