ServiceNow Reviews

We use ServiceNow for help desks.

ServiceNow is one of the few easiest platforms you can integrate with products like Ansible to automate your workflows.

The solution’s user interface could be improved and given a better design.

I have been using ServiceNow for more than three years.

ServiceNow is a stable solution, and I haven't experienced any downtime with it.

I rate ServiceNow ten out of ten for stability.

Around 500 to 800 users from the IT team and some of the business teams in our organization use ServiceNow.

Overall, I rate ServiceNow an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for ITSM and a little bit of ITOM. However, we don't use it for ITBM.

Role-based access is a 'positive'.

ServiceNow has a feature called Orchestration. In that, you can utilize the tool to communicate with applications and systems to issue commands and perform actions. That's a positive, it's something that does exist in the tool. We are in our infancy in utilizing that.

There's a relatively new feature called performance analytics. It's supposed to provide a lot more information. It's got machine learning and some AI built into it. We're our infancy with that. 

For the nuts and bolts running of an IT organization, I can't really say there's anything lacking, feature-wise.

The solution is relatively easy to use.

One thing I don't care for is the reporting and the way it functions. Exporting a report, from a view,  initiates a rerun of the query in the background - highly inefficient.

In terms of the implementation, there seems to be a dearth of basic table joins, on initial install, necessitating the creation of your own database views to get seemingly related data to act like related data. In other words, it's popular to have incidents linked to changes, and linked to problems, and linked to other types of records. And vice versa, you could have an incidents caused by a change. You could have an incident that has a problem record built off of it. However, there are several modules where, if you don't create table joins - for example, for demand records and demand tasks - between those two, then the only option is pull two reports (one for Demands, one for Demand Tasks), and manually merge them outside of the tool. It's highly inefficient. That is something that is a deficiency within the tool design overall.

The initial setup is a bit complex (could have been designed to be profile-driven, as an alternative).

While I recognize that it's a popular thing to do, due to poor design, update sets have to be moved manually, from platform to platform, easily introducing errors (sequence, origin, etc.)  along the way. I've seen far better promote-to-production schemes with other tools.

I've been using ServiceNow for more than 5 years.

Scales 'up' well.  

Scales 'down' poorly.

The solution is not exactly scalable for a mom-and-pop shop (and SMBs). The costs would be too prohibitive for that.

Someone once said, a bird, no matter the size, has the same number of bones. If you're going to do incident change problem, asset config, things like that, for a mom-and-pop, technically, you have the same number of types of things you need to be concerned about. It's just the volume of how it's being applied. A mom-and-pop store might carry 50 items in its inventory. A large company is going to have thousands upon thousands. Therefore, ServiceNow would not be a good solution for a small organization with few assets. 

If you don't have a full CMDB to begin with it really makes a lot of things awkward within the tool. 

We have 4,000+ 

ServiceNow Technical support needs improvement.

One example - 

Order - (context - business rules) - ServiceNow allows you to have any number of rules with the same order number. 

ServiceNow's official answer to 'how does the database code decide which rule to execute first, when multiple business rules are assigned the same order level?': we have no answer 

(it goes without saying - use unique order levels)

We're just a customer and an end-user.

We started on-prem and then switched to cloud. We switched to the cloud about three years ago.

- fill out the CMDB before you start implementing the tool - make the time.

- plan out table joins as you implement new modules.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. I would just warn others that it's too easy to incorporate abysmally poor design.

Multi Tenant, Scalable, Flexible and Stable

It has improved out response time to the client

The reporting is very good. 

The solution has very good automation tools.

The solution has been extremely stable so far. 

The need to improve their technical support services. 

Their dashboards are very, very basic. Maybe if they could develop some sort of very good fancy-looking, visible, graphical, visible kind of appearance. 

The pricing of the solution could be better. It's a bit high.

When we are monitoring, for example, a device, an S-Switch, we can create insights. We can segregate the LAN, and create a VLAN. When we create those VLANs, we should be able to monitor those VLANs. The same with storage systems. The LANs, through the cable space level, should be able to be monitored. 

I've been working with the solution for eight or nine years so far. It's been almost a decade. I've used it for a while now. 

The stability is excellent. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. I find it to be reliable. 

The solution works very well for large enterprises. If you have a very, very big setup, it's an ideal option.

Technical support could be better. We are not satisfied with the level of support they offer.

I've also worked with SolarWinds and ManageEngine. I prefer ServiceNow, as there's a lot of automation tools available in that and it's been a stable product. It's been in the market for a long time. It's got a good market reach also.

Very Complex, 13 companies, 9 Towers, 17,000 devices

First time we implemented it through Vendor and we took a training from the OEM and now we have a team to deploy the solution

Not calculated, but I would say 2 years we recover the cost 

Their pricing is relatively high. They are expensive.

Yes,

SolarWinds and ManageEngine

We are not a partner or reseller. I'm a consultant. Before that, I have implemented the products. I've migrated a lot of products, a lot of systems. That's how I have an association with monitoring tools and service test tools.

I differently would recommend the solution if a company is a huge enterprise. For example, if you are maybe looking at more than some 10,000 or 20,000 devices. There should be a minimum of 10,000 devices or 15,000 devices. I would recommend ServiceNow for those setups. For data centers and other things, definitely I would recommend ServiceNow. I would not recommend SolarWinds or ManageEngine for these types of setups. I don't see that much capacity in them. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We use this solution for managing IT assets and business operations.

We are also using it to help make better business decisions.

Using ServiceNow has forced conversations around the whole IT domain, on how we can manage the IT assets through their life cycles. This starts with identifying the need and introducing it, developing it, and deploying it, to then eventually making decisions to remove the asset from the operation.

I can use it to see the whole life cycle.

As a company, it's about how you get your data in there and manage it.

I like all of the operations and features that I have seen.

I like that it's running on a unified platform and that there is no data integration.

I can get a real-time view of how our assets are performing.

I also like that with the operations running on a unified platform, I can then get a better picture of ITHealth through the application platform management tool.

I really like what they've done with their common service data model because now I can make a connection between the business process and technology. I can start showing the role some of the technologies are playing and talk about the health of the technology and even connecting it up to the business strategies. You can do that with the APM component.

I like having one platform to get that view.

The marketing needs improvement. This platform can really do a lot and I don't think they do it justice for what it can do. 

I have to go out there and market things. Whereas I think if their teams were a little more in tune with what they could actually deliver, they would do a better job selling it.

I still haven't seen a holistic picture of the whole platform and what they can really do. I don't know if that's intentional or if they're not selling it.

The visuals are the one area where there is opportunity for improvement. 

The reporting can be difficult, but they are making it a little easier to create reports or introduce a wizard to help you walk through them.

You have to know the entity-relationship diagram to get the right data and make the right connections. 

The visual representation of the data is an area where they fall short of, but they do have a partner who is native to their product. It does a much better job visualizing the data. I don't know if that is there, the way they're closing the gap.

I would like to see, from a business process automation perspective, where an engineer or architect could implement the automation. You don't have to write the spec and hand it off to a ServiceNow developer.

For some of the things that are happening with the other BPM tools, I'd like to see ServiceNow be a little more user-friendly. Another thing I'd like to see is that they have a representation and their service taxonomy of a more modern application for events business logic, as well as APIs. As it is now, it's still in the application and infrastructure perspective, but that's not totally a modern construction of an application.

I have been using ServiceNow for 12 years.

We are running the current version. 

From a SaaS perspective, it's very stable. I think in the 12 years that I've been running it, I have seen maybe one or two outages. For the most part, it's pretty stable.

I haven't really experienced any performance problems. I am assuming that they are monitoring and extending it when they need to.

I don't know how many users they have at my current company. In my last company, we had more than 1,000 users. They were primarily IT except for the work request part of it that came in from the entire enterprise.

It is being used extensively. There are definitely plans it increase the usage. I am working on the plans to extend it. It was just introduced in March, more for the kind of IT service side of it. Problems, incidents, change, and work requests for example. 

Now I am looking to bring in governance, risk, and compliance. 

Also, having conversations with other areas like business continuity, disaster recovery, and security about how they could leverage the same platform for some of their operations.

I think whoever purchased it had this in their vision, they're just not communicating who's vision right now. I have been having those conversations to get people to understand what we will be able to do in the future so that they buy into making the move and investing in learning how to use ServiceNow.

I wasn't on the support team. I am on the architecture team, but as far as technical insights go, and to help make decisions, they have been very good at sharing knowledge. 

I have a couple of connections right now who, as I'm trying to push things out a little bit more, I'm pinging. I am getting help with enterprise ERDs and different things, and they're very responsive to them.

I was not involved in the setup of this solution. It was already in place when I started with the company.

To others who are interested in implementing ServiceNow, I would say, consider it for running your IT operations, but implement it capability by capability. This will allow you to see the big picture of what you're going to get at the end of it. You can't do a big bang approach on this. Rather, you have to be very deliberate in how you implement it.

They have thought through it, and not just the whole domain in the platform but now they have connected it to the business side, the business needs and the processes, the work that people do down to the technology. I think that was missing a few years ago, probably more than a few years ago. Because I think they met with them in 2016 around it. But they have got that now, and it is really powerful. 

I've been working through the taxonomy with different parts of the organization and the fact that they can start making some of these connections in a system I think is phenomenal.

Also, they have the assets included. When you do an assessment to see, how healthy it is, you can not only see who has impacted the business applications that are impacted, which drives you to the people and the processes and all those things. You can also see what the root cause of the cross problem is, and manage the root cause in a more holistic manner.

For its space and what it is capable of doing, I would rate ServiceNow a nine out of ten.

We were using ServiceNow to collect data in problem areas in operations. Most recently we are using it for our internal hardware tracking. For example, if someone requires a change of computer system, new headset, or any other hardware defects.

ServiceNow has helped improve our organization by making it more efficient. Since we only need to manage the cloud service and not other aspects, such as infrastructure or software, this has freed up 30% of our human resources that can be utilized on other tasks. The solution has added value to the company.

The solution is easy to use, simple to make queries, flexible to configure, integrates well, and supports all of our companies needs.

If you want to do analysis about a problem or collect information and export the data on a spreadsheet or a BI system is very easy. The data is able to be selected very fast which is very good because, in general, to export or to restore the information with another tool was terrible. You practically needed to go directly to the database and export it from there instead of having the ability in the menu of the application. With ServiceNow, the options are in the menu and you can do all your queries directly and export them in different formats. This saves us a lot of time and makes our work a little easier.

The solution is always updating and you are able to see the road map of what is going to come in the future.

When we are using the solution on mobile phones on their networks the performance is reduced with a delay of approximately 8 seconds. There is less delay using the desktop computers connected to the WiFi or to the network directly.

I have been using the solution for approximately three years.

The solution is very stable. We have never had an issue with ServiceNow, I do not remember a time we had a problem with the application. However, there are problems with the network, internet connection, and mobile networks, but not in the application. If there is a connection issue once the connection is established again the recovery is very good because the data automatically start to flow without any problem between both applications.

Azure has had only one incident in three years of use in our experience. 

The solution is scalable. It is in the contract of the SaaS we have the ability to scale the solution in the cloud. We have never experienced problems because if we demand more capacity for processing we automatically receive it from Azure.

We have 24 hours a day, 7 days a week support. However, I have never needed to use it.

The installation or deployment is easy because this is a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution and it is managed by ServiceNow.

They analyze the use of the tools they provide us with and they do the new deployments in a slot time when we do not use the tool or have minimal use. They inform us typically more than a week in advance and they send several friendly reminders when the cloud service has to do a change, a new deployment, or an upgrade. They are very flexible to keep the downtime of the service at a minimum and at a time that the tools are not being used.

The color scheme we are using is not good because sometimes the background is difficult for me to view. However, this is a company decision and can be changed.

We use a SaaS solution because the service has improved performance and maintains the up-to-date security of the application. As a company, we do not need to worry about doing upgrades because everything is looked after by ServiceNow. It is a very good solution and has worked very well for us.

I rate ServiceNow a nine out of ten.

The solution is being used for our ticketing system.

It is user-friendly and simple to use. 

The solution could be made cheaper. Machine learning and artificial intelligence should be introduced in the next release. 

I have been using ServiceNow for two years. 

The scalability of the solution is good. Presently, ten thousand users are using the solution. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

The initial setup is easy. The deployment was done within a month. 

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

We used ServiceNow for change management, release management, and event management. We were also making use of the solution's CSI. The modules of ServiceNow were all available to you, and you could use them.

I have a problem with the way the solution's price is calculated.

I have been using ServiceNow for 10 to 13 years.

I rate ServiceNow an eight or nine out of ten for stability.

I would recommend ServiceNow for larger organizations. We used to have an organization with over 10,000 users. In our current organization, up to 3,000 users are using ServiceNow.

The solution’s technical support is fine.

We implemented the solution through an in-house team.

For us, ServiceNow was really good for keeping everything under control. Everything was documented, logged, and on point. The setup of creating things was quite straightforward.

The use and misuse of the CMDB is something important. Since CMDB should be the heart of everything you have, transforming the CMDB into a repository of information is good enough. If you don't use the full management tool, you can have problems. In three months, you will have to review the CMBD again, or you will have to update it once again in six months.

It differs from organization to organization. It will be taken care of in organizations that have clear processes in place. It's not about the tool but about the maturity of the organization using it.

We used to have lots of integrations with our systems to create tickets automatically. We also had some security related event management activities. When we requested to change something in ServiceNow, it was done rapidly in a couple of days.

Have some consultants that have worked with ServiceNow before, help you with the process. You should try to implement ITIL in your organization. If ITIL is not understood by the organization, then you cannot have expectations that they will follow the way of working as they should.

The solution's automation is quite straightforward. You just need to know what you want to automate. There are several ways to integrate stuff and several ways to have some triggers.

Overall, I rate the solution ten out of ten.

I'm a service manager, so I'm mainly focusing on customers' CMDB, incidents, changes, and problem management tasks. We have many global customers with network solutions.

It improved the customer experience. For instance, preference management is very useful to be able to set up automated notifications based on various things, such as site priority, site size, client's importance, and incident's priority. We can configure that only a portion of a group gets P1, P2, or P3 cases. Those features have really improved the relationship with the customers and within the organization. The reporting features and the setup of the customer CMDB file are improving the customer experience, and our internal groups are also able to benefit from them because they are using it daily. If there is an incident, it is an advantage that they don't need to fill out things. The notifications are also sent out automatically. So, they are saving time, and they can focus more on taking care of the customers, communicating with them, and taking up new issues.

I really like ServiceNow and all of the features. The way incident management is built is very helpful. You have a lot of options to optimize it, customize it, and automate it. You also have a lot of options for reporting. There are plenty of possibilities to do preference management within your customer CMDB file. These are very useful features, which I missed in BMC Remedy ITSM. ServiceNow is the best ticketing tool I have used so far.

I have enjoyed all the features. There is not any feature that I have missed or didn't have.

I have been mainly using it for the past three years. I also used it previously for two years, and then I stopped for three years.

It is totally stable. I never had issues with it.

I believe it is scalable.

We were having a lot of issues. It took nine months to fix all of them. Those were mainly because of customer requirements that were not caught firsthand. There were virtual connections, and there were different bespoke elements that we needed to have. That was the reason we had to resolve some technical issues, but they were within our company. It wasn't outsourced to ServiceNow itself.

We had BMC Remedy ITSM. Our ITSM was already outdated. It had no support, and we were looking for a new solution that had all the features we needed. Our first priority was customer satisfaction, but the choice wasn't up to me. It has always been up to the organization. I didn't have the chance to choose. I have just been given a solution.

It was complex because we support network customers. They have dedicated fiber connections all around the world. It was a complex project, and we suffered afterward in terms of missing features and so on, but that wasn't because of ServiceNow. It was rather an internal issue of not allocating enough resources.

The implementation took six to nine months because we needed to prepare the cutoff. We did a pilot phase with dedicated customers, and we tested it first. After that, we rolled it out, and then based on agile, we fixed any production issues. We prioritized them, highlighted them, and we fixed them, which took another nine months. 

We had at least 20 people, but not all of them were for deployment. We have many global customers with network solutions. They are scattered around the globe with different priorities and focuses. It wasn't an easy task to gather all the information about the features that we and the customers require. We were also using two ticketing systems. So, we had to organize and then migrate.

It was deployed around the globe because there were some users in the U.K., Ireland, Germany, Hungary, India, and Egypt. So, it was deployed at several locations.

I would absolutely advise using it. I have been an advocate within our company to change different tools and move different departments to ServiceNow because it's a really useful tool. I would recommend it to others.

I would rate it a 10 out of 10. I'm totally satisfied with it.