ServiceNow Reviews

The most valuable feature by far of ServiceNow is the rapid development. How quickly you can actually go out and change things, adapt things, ready to fulfill the business needs.

One of the things that we're trying to figure out is how ServiceNow can be more of a platform to be used as a backend. Because of the rapid development, it can barely oversee it for use at the back end. We're having discussions right now to actually understand what that will mean. The other piece is some of the UI's are currently being restricted from not having too much customizations. That puts us in a tough spot. Sometimes there are some corner cases where some people want something and we kind of change it. Those are mostly with new UI's. There's good reasons for actually locking those down. At the same time, it problematic for us.

I have been using personally ServiceNow for about five years.

Best in class. It has been really good; it's availability, reliability, performance. Sometimes people do dumb stuff with scripts. The performance is not the platform's problem, the problem is with peoples scripts.

It scales well.

It's great. I'm part of the ServiceNow community, so that helps for support. Their support works great - they are really helpful, they have the indicators and all the right stuff for closing tickets really quickly and they also put first resolving your issue. It's really great support.

We used to use different solutions. Some of it was kind home-grown. Nothing similar to ServiceNow from as a platform perspective.

It's already set up, you just have to work it out according to your needs. Just like in any other project, you need to understand your process, you need to understand how you need to improve your process. Don't automate the problem. Just like any other process, the recommendation is you either work with ServiceNow or you're work with a technology partner. I'm a technology partner and we help others with those types of things. It's really straightforward.

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.

The ability to manipulate or customize all of the underlying structure.

That's a really hard question because their target audience is so diverse. They've got everything from medical to university and everything in-between. For me personally, I would say all these new features, these new things that they're doing are awesome, but I want documentation on what they're doing on the underside, what they're doing behind the scenes. I think I'm honestly in the minority with that. I think most people want to just get some admins and have them be able to do everything that a developer can do. I would say as far as marketing or sales, I would say they're probably going in the right direction. Enabling the admins to do more and more and more, while locking down, so they don't muck around and screw stuff up.

I've used it for four years.

It doesn't crash. They have a terrific up time, but I would expect that when you have four redundancies, that goes without saying. I would say that for the things that I like to do, which is muck around in the underlying, I would say that it's going downhill.

The most recently released Geneva locked up a bunch of stuff. A good example is UI16. There's a bunch of stuff that's undocumented and it's locked away. It makes it very hard to get to. I would say that's a definite negative.

As far as I'm aware, it scales beautifully. You just throw another stack or two or 20 at it and off you go. We make a lot of custom apps, custom modules, which is why I muck around in the underside. As far as that goes, for scalability the sky is the limit.

They're a funny group. I've never had a ticket that I've submitted to support that was answered by the initial person that received it. It usually ends up going to their tier two or in some cases, the developer. I don't know how to answer that question because the questions I ask are very hard. I've been doing it for a long time. I'm sure that the support team is fantastic for someone that's new to the product or hasn't used it before but for me it's a bit of a rigmarole.

Actually, it's very complex. Usually, you're doing it with a partner. Most institutions have partnered with someone to help them with an implementation. How well it goes is usually on the implementation engineer or their team's shoulders. I have gone through an implementation that was just horrific and we made it work. I've seen implementations that go fantastic. You just turn a key and there it goes. I would say it really depends on the quality of your implementation engineer.

I would ask about the use case. What are you trying to solve? What are you trying to do? Then I would advise based on their feedback provided and their budget. Some budgets are very small and I don't know if they would work with this solution.

In my role it would be Demand and Project because I'm a project manager.

I attended some of the sessions about Helsinki and I think some might be addressed there - reporting and Gantt charts. Calendar views - there are no nice calendar views and I think I'm just starting to learn about resource management but it would be nice for them to have the roadmaps so you can see an actual calendar view to see where from a project, (not necessarily resource but project) wear you are. Calendar views would be a huge addition.

Our company's been using it about two years, myself I've been using it about a year and a half.

No downtime that I know of.

It's a scalable product and we see it scaling for us.

I haven't been involved a lot with the support. I think that's going to change and I think I will get involved more but for right now I don't know that we've had issues. I haven't heard of any so I'm assuming we haven't.

I'll go out on the Wiki and look for answers and I might jump over to the community to try to find information.

For the first portion of it, I know we had a lot of internal change management so it took a little bit longer but they rolled it out all at once. I think it took about six months but I wasn't here for that. We rolled out Project and Demand and we did it in two months.

Go for it. I actually said that to someone who's nervous about doing it. Get everybody on it, don't do it piecemeal.

One of the gals that did a presentation [at Knowledge 16] said they're using demand and project but still using Microsoft Project. Don't do that, put it all in Servicenow. Even though it may be a little clunky in certain places, it helps to have one tool and everything in one place.

How configurable ServiceNow is, but at the same time you have to know what you're doing. It's not easy to make mistakes, but at the same time I guess it is. It's kind of difficult to explain.

Right now the way we have our structure is that we use record producers that go to a form, and we use the variable editor to show the record producer. One of the limitations is if you do UI policies and client scripts on the record producer, it doesn't transfer over to the variable editor, so it's kind of like you're doing double the work. If you use the requested item table, you don't have to do double that work, which seems like a limitation that you can't use that functionality on any other table besides the requested item table. That's a big one that bothers me.

I've used it for a little less than a year.

From what I heard we've had contractors who've come in who've worked on other people's incidences, and they say our incidence is the buggiest of all the other incidences they've dealt with. When we promote update sets some of the updates in the update set don't go to the next environment. It's completely random, and it shows up in the update set in the environment you push it to that it was promoted properly, but it doesn't show up. You have to go into that environment and make the changes. Little things like that, but it's always up and running, unless our company has an internet issue.

We're using it in one of our divisions, but cross functionally, so we see it scaling up.

Ninety percent of the time the people that respond to the high tickets that we open are really knowledgeable and solve our questions within a week. In the high ticket when you select a category, there's not enough categories, so sometimes we just have to select one. In that instance, we sometimes get somebody who doesn't really understand what are questions was, because we weren't able to select a great category for them to understood what was going on.

Go for it, but start in a small area, and don't bite off more than you can chew, because it does take time to develop this stuff. It's not as easy as everybody thinks, so I wouldn't make too many promises that you're going to get stuff out there quick.

The ease of use is great, whether it be for someone like me who's an administrator and developer, or just the end user in general. The fact that it's cloud-based, so you can access it from anywhere as long as you have a browser, or a smartphone. The overall ease of use is great.

The whole mobile aspect seems to be the key. People are still working, they’re not at their desks, so they need an easy way to work. I think that's going well in that direction. It seems like ServiceNow as a company has a pretty good vision on where they are, where they should be and it really matches up well with what we're looking to do.

We've been using it for just about a year now.

The availability has been great. Any issues we've come up with we've been able to easily rectify with working with support, so I would say it's definitely great.

Right now we pretty much just deployed it for IT use. We're getting ready to deploy it for some of our organizations outside of IT like our broadcast operations, our repeater, even facilities, so I think the future is looking good.

Probably the best that I've ever dealt with. Really knowledgeable. Usually pretty quick on getting back with you. Their website, wiki, and community are great. Probably the best support I've ever dealt with in my twenty plus years in the industry.

I've been in this industry so long. Prior to this I'd been working with Remedy for about fifteen years or so. This takes me back to the really old Remedy days when it was a really great product, before they were bought out by a big company, where there was a great community and great conferences.

It's pretty straightforward. We worked with a partner, Logic Callus to help us get setup. We had a hard date because we were coming off of an existing cloud system, so we had to really push hard to make it in that time frame, but we were up and running incident change, problem, and service catalog in two months. Basically what we had allotted for. It was pretty seamless.

I would tell you to take a look at it. It's a great product. Get a demo and get familiar with it, because you can pretty much do anything you need to do with it.

Originally when we first rolled out, it was obviously the fact that we had full IT service management in one area. We were extremely scattered and had many different tools all over the place and none of them were integrated. That was our initial sell feature for us.

As time has gone on and ServiceNow has evolved and matured, we are loving the ease of the product. Each year, each version, each release they come out with is all that much more configurable for us. One of the biggest things for us is the fact that we've had the opportunity to be a partner with them and have had the opportunity to have some input and feedback on their product to begin with and have seen some of that that have come to fruition. In fact, I just saw a demonstration and there were several things that I know were a part of suggesting and the input that they received from their customers.

I hadn't really thought much beyond the improvements that I'm seeing that they're putting out in Helsinki. My organization is currently on the Fuji release. We were going to be upgrading to the Geneva release in July. One of the things we were coming here [to Knowledge16] specifically to look at is jumping on the release and going straight from Fuji to Helsinki. Considering some of the things that I just saw that they rolled out, I'm going to be pushing pretty hard for that.

Many of the things that we felt needed a little bit more shoring up was their CMBD product and their discovery, they seem to have covered that in the Helsinki release. I'm not really thinking of what the next step is going to be at this point. I was wowed with Helsinki, so at this point I'm looking forward to rolling that in and working with it.

We implemented it back in 2011.

I like the scalability of it. We need an instance that we will have it within 24 hours. In fact, we have several instances in the Cloud. We have our production instance, we have a test instance, and we have four development instances.

I'm not necessarily involved in the day to day support that we would have to reach out to. Our architect is more involved with that. However, I do know that I have been the contributor of a few of the bugs that have been found. They seem to be very responsive, work with our developer and our architect team and work through the issues.

When we started out, we did it in phases. Our very first phase was the change management application in a very condensed version of the incident management application. Phase two rolled out in late 2014. At that point, we went to a full incident management application. We revamped our change management application, rolled out problem service catalog, discovery, our CMDB. We have quite a few, some 38, applications that are currently turned on. They were pretty basic and we've been over the years developing and expanding those.

The integration and automation are most valuable.

Their debugging tool. Sometimes it's hard to debug some of the scripts because once Javascript fails, it doesn't really tell you why. It just skips over it and It keeps going. That's probably the biggest room for improvement.

I've used it for about a year.

We've not experienced any downtime whatsoever.

We got ServiceNow to build apps for our company. That's what we're really using tit for our business relationship with customers outside IT.

They're responsive, had no problems with them. Any time we did have an issue, we submitted a ticket, and they'll get right back to you and call you. I haven't had any problems personally.

We were using email. It was pretty bad and we were dropping the ball often.

It's a great tool. I would say people need to get their processes correct before they get the tool because that really drives what ServiceNow is. You have to be somewhat oriented for the tool to work. Once you get oriented, it'll drive that process but if you had that process beforehand the tool is going to keep going.