ServiceNow Reviews

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.

I would say the ability to create applications that follow a standard workflow as well as record producers. We handle a lot of requests from our entire university. The biggest thing is giving our users a service catalog with a bunch of simple items, most of them are record producers, some of them need a workflow, just allowing them to go in and very simply submit request. For us that's probably the most valuable feature.

They've gotten to a pretty good place with where they are right now. I think a lot of it is going to be that citizen developer, making things a little bit easier to interface with. I really like the new rest messaging they put in there that allows for much easier integrations. I like most of the new application stuff and the IDE. I'd say from here, just smoothing out that whole IDE development process, making it easier to make changes to global in the IDE if that's where they really want us. Some improvements are probably needed there but I don't have anything massive on my list that ServiceNow needs to do.

I've personally used it for about four years.

I had no issues. When there is potential for a downtime, they always email me and let me know. Even when I get those emails, I've experienced mild hiccups but beyond that, I've never been locked out for more than maybe 30 seconds in 4 years.

When we started, we had about 35-40 IT folks inside of ServiceNow, plus probably about a thousand end-users logging in for self-service. Now we've probably about quadrupled that at this point and run into very little snags. I would say the biggest thing with scalability for us from a ServiceNow perspective is just make sure your user data matches whatever you're using elsewhere. We use single sign on and we need to make sure that the user data in ServiceNow matches that so that users can actually get in when they're supposed to get in.

It's mostly good. I would say there had been times where it's taking a long time for a resolution. Sometimes that's probably just due to the fact that whatever I'm submitting is not that important. I'll happily admit that.

I've had some issues that have taken four to five months to get fixed. Again, we're not talking the show stoppers. When I needed something, I've had probably two cases in the last few years where it's just been absolutely integral, like I'd get an answer right now. They were pretty good in those situations.

I would tell you that for me and for what our business uses, I highly recommend it, but that you should look at their business case and see if you need a product as fully-featured as ServiceNow is because it comes at a cost. Depending on what your needs are, it's possible to look at other products. There are a lot of similar products out there. ServiceNow is probably not the cheapest but if you have a specific set of needs particularly the ease of building applications, request forms, stuff I mentioned earlier, I think it's the best product on the market.

I like the adaptability and the flexibility of the tool. We've had a number of ideas, "Hey, I wish there was a way we could do this." and "Oh, well, let's make that happen." Then very quickly we were able to figure out a way to make it work and now there's a way we can make that happen. That's the best thing about it.

I think the biggest thing that I've seen is when we've moved to the knowledge-based version three, which happened relatively recently, there were a lot of new improvements that came with that, but there were a lot of things that actually seemed like a little bit of a step back. What we're hoping is that some of that's just like, "We wanted to present you with this new tool and we're going to add some of these things back in later on." There's a lot of the flexibility that we've come to expect from ServiceNow that seem to be gone in that new version.

I've personally used it for about three years.

We have the occasional problems with slowness, but I can't remember a single instance where it's been completely down.

For the foreseeable future, I think it's what we're going to stick with.

The support's been excellent. Our local rep has been excellent and I haven't personally reached out to technical support or anything, but I have been using the community and that's been great to have. The Wikis is an excellent resource so there's a lot of resources out there.

I wasn't there in our initial setup but our upgrades have been relatively painless.

I would absolutely recommend it. We're a little bit of a unique case in a lot of ways because we were on ServiceNow a couple years ago and we actually moved away from it, because we're running Salesforce for the rest of our university for case management. There was a mandate that we wanted everything to be in Salesforce, so we actually moved away from ServiceNow to Remedyforce. It was a disaster and about a year later we moved back to ServiceNow. I think it's an interesting demonstration of the fact that it's such a good product that even after we moved away from it we came back.

A lot of pain and tears went into that migration. We didn't really want to do another migration eight months later, but it was so worth it to do it. It's absolutely worth the investment of time and effort to do it.

It's ease of use, extensibility and just the ability to take it out of the box and use it with minimal custom configuration.

The documentation needs work. The wiki is woefully inadequate. I support federal customers, there's a separate US government approval process to use instances, and we're behind the rest of the public community. For instance, we don't even have permission to use Geneva yet, and Helsinki is already out. I know they're working on it and it's going to be faster, but right now it's a challenge. You see all these new features and we can't go out and use them until the government says we can.

I've been using it since 2009.

We've had no issues with the performance.

It's been able to scaler for our needs.

They're inconsistent. Depending on who you get, they may or may not be able to immediately provide the kind of response you need and sometimes they take a while to do it.

I wouldn't say that I use the community a lot. I think our developers do, and I'm not a developer. They go out and use it more than I do.

It was easy to set up.

I would recommend it. I think the biggest challenge with all of the functionality that exists in ServiceNow today is to figure out where to start, and having a narrow strategy so that when you do buy it you don't try to do everything at once and get nothing done. A lot of the sessions around here [at Knowledge16] have done a good job in outlining that and driving their experience. I definitely recommend it.

It's very easy to customize and build off of. It's a simple platform to get up to speed on. Every company I've worked for has enjoyed their idle focus. The usability is a valuable feature, a lot of customers just enjoy the usability of it.

Since I've been working with the product for a long time, it feel like in the old days it was kind of a smaller, cult-like following. You had a more family-like community. Now it's gotten so big and it's kind of lost a little bit of that. I guess that's good for their business.

They seem to be trying to branch out and do a lot more than just ITSM which is usually what the core focus is, so sometimes there might be a little bit less emphasis on that. Personally I haven't seen that, but other people have mentioned it. It'll be interesting if they try to be all things to all people. They've gotten more polished, more professional, larger and a lot more sales-oriented when they went public. I don't really have many bad things to say about them.

I've personally used it since 2007. I worked at a company called Progress Energy. It was in Raleigh, North Carolina. They were an early adopter and we luckily fell into it at the right time.

It was never bad, but in the early days there was definitely more outages, and we had an SLA. I think initially we even got some money back from them in the early early days in Progress. I'd say over the past five years or so that the reliability's been excellent.

I've had no issues with scaling, especially in the last five years. Availability seems to really have helped. We still have some performance issues, but sometimes those could be network related and not vendor related. Sometimes it's our development which is causing the trouble. I would not blame ServiceNow for any kind of performance issues that we've had.

Currently, we're not really scaled up at this particular point, so I don't foresee that being an issue, but we could encounter that later.

I'd say it's fairly good. The bigger they've got, the more I guess standardized their high systems become. Usually if we have something that really shows up on our radar, we can get a hold of somebody and get it addressed. In the earlier days when we had more of those, we also had pretty good luck at being able to get some senior engineers on problems that we had, even if they were self-inflicted problems.

We've used ServiceNow professional services and I've really enjoyed working with them and some of the other high-level partners, but to be honest with you, my current company isn't big on contractors. It's kind of an act of parliament to get them to bring somebody in from outside.

Being more technical myself, would say that having a clear and consistent view of your requirements, what you want to do, and to try to stay out of the box at first as much as possible. This is the third company I've worked for who uses ServiceNow and we always try to over-customize it at first, because everybody has very defined processes. Over-customization of the tool will hamstring you in how you can take advantage of stuff that they release. They always seem to release something that you're wanting to build right after you build it.

It's been a challenge because a lot of people think they know better, and everybody does it their own way. Staying out of the box initially is really helpful. Any tool can be made bad if you put garbage in. That's the biggest issue I've seen.