ServiceNow Reviews

I'm the unit manager of the network operations center so I'm a core user of the tool. I don't get involved in the development, deployment or support of it, but we get a lot of tickets in the network operations center. I think probably some of the best things the tool brings to us revolve around the ability to manage all of our work. The intake of the work, tracking it and helping it move through the different processes so tracking incidents, then times they turn into a problem that we have to follow up and come up with a root cause.

For me as the manager of the network operations center, it's mainly around being able to track our work, know who is working on what, what our work volume is, how it ties to the different services that we support.

The reporting is one piece that's a lot of interest to me in the network operations center. We don't have a ton of metrics today mainly because we haven't put the effort in that direction, but we want to. I poked around on the reporting a little bit and I went to a session [at Knowledge16] on performance analytics. I thought, gee this looks like what I'm after but we have yet to purchase that module. I don't know if we will or won't so I guess I don't have enough experience to say. I see the potential there.

I think it's bringing a lot of stuff that's been handled by a lot of different applications and a lot of different areas in one place. We grew up with a few different areas which had their own tools for a long time for ticketing and managing assets. Basically bringing it all into one place I think is very beneficial.

I would say there really isn't anything I found that I really dislike. Now the caveat to that statement is we've been going at the deployment for a while. Again, I'm the user, the consumer side of the tool. What I'm waiting and watching to see is, as these new modules roll out, as we implement change and knowledge base, I've got myself and my group, we've got a lot of work to do yet just to learn the tool as it is today. We haven't really gotten into it far enough to say, "Gee I really don't like this."

The sense I get just from some of the classes that I've taken where I've been poking around in some of the tools that we don't have yet, I do see there's definitely a learning curve involved. Now I look at it like there's a learning curve involved in any new tool you bring into your organization. I think the overall pain of the learning curve maybe less when you have a common tool like the ServiceNow. If I get over the learning curve for problem management, for example, I'm probably halfway there with change, incident and the rest of them. A lot of things you're going to learn and want are applicable together. I think overall the total learning curve will probably be less.

I haven't had any issues. As a matter of fact since we've been using it, I can't think of one time where it was unavailable or had an issue. I haven't seen that as an issue from an end user perspective. I have it up periodically. The folks in my unit have it up all the time to monitor the queues and I haven't heard any issues with it.

I really haven't been involved in that side of it, we're the development side. From an end user, I think just as I've watched them enable more modules, bring on more things, I haven't noticed any kinds of performance issues.

We used BMC Remedy for ticketing system. We never really had a CMDB as we had various databases that housed different information so BMC Remedy, is the main one that comes to mind that we used prior to ServiceNow, that we'll be sun setting. We actually had some in-house tools as well that we developed.

We did so to manage things like our change records and actually that really was the formal IT CMDB if you will. We had some home-grown tools as well that we're working on sun setting.

There's another group in our organization that's responsible for the purchasing decisions. One of the things I heard that was maybe of concern to me, is that we had our in-house system that we used to communicate to our end user groups around change. I have some concerns about the ability in ServiceNow and the capability to notify end users of changes. I think if I was not mistaken that's in part due to licencing. We have about two thousand IT people versus total of about sixty thousand employees.

I believe there was a licencing cost issue around if I want all those people to be able to subscribe to change notifications. I don't quite understand how that works fully but I get the sense that there was maybe some cost challenges with that. From an end user perspective and the network operations center, we make a lot of changes that have the potential impact, large geographical areas and try to figure out how do to notify our end users. That's what I don't really know yet, how that ServiceNow tool is going to help us do that. We're still trying to figure that piece out.

One piece of advice I would give you from my perspective is that if you're going to deploy it, make sure you put the appropriate amount of effort into training the end users. I think there is some complexity learning how to navigate it and I think for a lot of people having a document to follow is challenging sometimes. Make sure you put the appropriate amount of emphasis on training. I've been in IT for about 26 years, I've seen a lot of this stuff grow up in pieces.

It's filling a niche I think a lot of people have really, really wanted which is bringing a lot of this information into one central location. The various areas of IT can no longer operate in a vacuum, it has to operate as one large cohesive IT department that aligns with the business. I think a tool like this helps bring a lot of that stuff into one place.

There's pretty much nothing that I have found yet that I couldn't accomplish within ServiceNow if I wanted to. I think for us, we tried several times to implement a CMDB, a configuration management database, and it failed for various reasons. With ServiceNow, we were able to finally do that. My boss refers to that as the pink unicorn, the mythical creature that did not exist.

We finally made that happen with ServiceNow. I feel that CMDB is actually my license plate.

I think historically we have had a real warrior spirit. We would get in there and do it and sometimes that meant we would write something in house. I think that we would invest a whole lot of time on something, and we would get real attached to it. Then the next thing you knew, you blinked your eyes, and we were behind the times. I think that we've made a giant leap or two in the last year, year and a half or so, that we've been using ServiceNow, that I've been involved with.

Now we have invested the time in the CMDB. We've invested the time in a portal and catalog items and now we're moving towards automation and things. We moved from Eureka to Geneva and now we've got this whole fresh look and all these new features. We're able to stay a lot more current a lot faster because ServiceNow is doing the work to keep the platform updated, whereas we can just continue to provide value that is specific to us and what we're trying to do.

There's some platform code that is compiled and its Java code on the server side. There's no documented API on what the functions and properties are of that code, and we're not able to reflect that code to get it to make our own API. I think some of the platform devs have met with me in the developer hub and said that they are working to provide that because they can see why we'd want it. I'm excited to hear that that gap will get closed soon.

Also, some of the way that the patches would break the catalog and the catalog items would cause unnecessary changes to the lay out in the UI. Like moving a field label from the left to underneath. If you have 30 items on a page, or more, that's going to offset everything. Unnecessary moves and then unnecessary moves back, stuff like that.

It's pretty solid. I think that on our dashboard it says 99.8% availability. Now a lot of my customers in the service desk that do our support line, over the phone or through chat, they're telling me that the CMDB look up for config items on the incoming incidents that they're starting, is way faster in Geneva. They've set it, set it, and reset it. It wasn't just a first impression. It's a lasting, "Thank you. Thank you. Thank you." They sent a special email. We don't normally have people that are raving fans of anything you provide tool wise. We have our customers who are usually raving fans on our airlines. This was kind of surprising to hear.

We add users constantly. We on-board people and they are automatically added. We have a portal that's internal for our users that don't need to do changer class but they do need to request things in the catalog so those people are able to log in and request stuff.

We didn't successfully implement a CMDB. I think different work groups were very siloed and they had the problem of, "Where's our stuff?" They each solved that problem on their own because there was no centralized management database. Some people used spreadsheets. Some people used Wiki Documents or Wiki Documents with spreadsheets in them. Other people just had it in their heads and like, "We'll go ask Jim or go ask Bob. Oh, Bob left. I'm sorry. Go ask Tim. Maybe Bob told Tim before he left." It was like that. What we were able to do was use this as the first product that actually worked. We did try a few other products but we weren't able to get that off the ground. I don't know if that really speaks to those products or if it was the lack of support that we had from our leadership to get it done. I wasn't involved so I don't remember who it was, but I don't believe they were home-grown.

We used a tiered approach. We did like five or six release cycles to get to where we are. We started with CMDB and change management at the same time and I think that that really worked well. When we were working in Remedy, our CMDB only kind of had Oracle database names and host names. Windows or Linux host names and that's it. It was pretty flat and people were used to it and it wasn't a whole lot of information to ask people to put in their change request. When we came over, we were able to stand up change and people were satisfied with just having the host names, which was fairly simple. Then we were able to do kind of a crawl, walk, run, run with scissors sort of thing. I think that it went well.

Come to a user group meeting and we'd love to connect, meet and show you what we've done and talk about where you're at and give you some feedback and advice about what worked, what didn't work, what we thought might work better.

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 primarily use the solution to support Airbus Helicopters.

It's great for handling support tickets and onboarding employees.

We have other facilities in the United States with teams in Herndon, Virginia, and Grand Prairie, Texas, and for networking, in Mobile, Alabama. By having our different specialists in different areas, we're able to leverage their expertise over a large geographical area.

They have these items called resolver groups that are quite useful, however, it's basically to assign tickets to various teams.

The onboarding of employees is very good.

It's great for handling new hardware requests or new user requests.

They offer standard templates. The more that you customize it, or add additional software requests, the more it becomes usable and powerful. 

The solution is stable.

The scalability is there if you need it.

My understanding is that the pricing is reasonable. 

ServiceNow is great. You can download the data into Excel and you can basically create reports. It's very flexible.

That features are already there, however, maybe they could have some tutorials or give more power to the users versus having specialist administrators doing things. There's a big knowledge base. There's a lot of know-how that's saved in there, however, actually allowing people to do their own thing is lacking a bit.

I know there are functionalities for using it on other platforms. However, specifically for iPhone or Android, if there's something where I'm walking around and working in different offices, if I'm able to look up information directly, instead of going back to my laptop, that would be ideal. Making a mobile version would be helpful.

It's pretty customized already. I don't think there's anything that would be an area to fix.

I know that I actually have the special panel for all the features that I use, like creating tickets, managing hardware. Anything that can be integrated into especially our other types of features, such as SCCM, Microsoft SCCM, being able to update hardware, instead of manually going inside there would be good.

I've used the solution for the last year.

The solution is pretty stable. The only thing is that it's a cloud version, and therefore, if your network is slow or non-responsive, then ServiceNow becomes slow and unresponsive. That's a network issue. That is not an application issue.

The solution is easy to scale. If we wanted to add other facilities, it would be fairly easy to do. Something that we're going to be taking on in the next year or so is integrating with another facility in Mirabel, Quebec. They do commercial aircraft. We do civilian helicopters. Integrating with that team more will be beneficial. We have around 60 people using it right now.

I personally have never had any issues where I had to raise it directly to ServiceNow. I cannot speak on the topic of support.

The company did use a different solution. It was not as integrated with the other parts of the company, which is why they switched.

The company was using another product before. They implemented this, I would say, within six months. It's been in place for two years now and it's matured.

I was not there for the deployment.

We have one SRM, senior relationship manager, that basically maintains the digital workspace. He's in charge of updating the versions or deploying new features. There's one person that does that.

There are built-in surveys and we track those metrics, and the metrics have been positive for the last two years. There's been a great improvement.

Due to the fact that we're dealing with different subcontractors, we have a company that does the networking and we have a company that does the desktop hardware. If it's more application support or accounting specific, then it goes somewhere else. Being able to bridge between those different subcontractors is a major selling point.

The pricing is reasonable. In terms of extra costs, likely if a company was going to do integrations, they might have to buy the different modules, however, I'm not involved in that.

I'm just a customer and an end-user.

I am currently up to date with the latest version.

I'd advise potential new seers that they'll get good asset management and be able to manage tickets. It's all straightforward and usable. In the past, I've used other products, and they're not that scalable. If you're working in a company that has multiple facilities, multiple countries, the best way to go is with ServiceNow.

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

ServiceNow is helpdesk software that I have some experience with. This is not a solution that I deploy. Rather, I interact with it using hooks between it and NetBrain.

It is used for the creation and tracking of tickets and incidents, tasks, projects, and self-ordering. Our parent company uses ServiceNow for ordering and it has been utilized with a lot of different workflows. This is something that we never did but now that we've merged together, and we've merged our instances of ServiceNow, it means more of those self-service tech catalogs now in place and utilized.

As an end-user, I have not had any real problems with it. I use the capabilities that I have to and it's one of the tools that I have to use because that is where tickets are presented.

ServiceNow is a very powerful tool that can perform a lot of different functions.

There is inherent complexity with this tool because of the number of things that it can do.

My company has been working with ServiceNow for close to 10 years.

This is a stable solution. There's very little that I'm aware of in terms of hiccups and complaints.

As an end-user, I have not been in contact with technical support.

We did have an on-premises solution until about a year and a half to two years ago, and now we're using the SaaS version. That changes features and then tools, and perhaps other things as well.

ServiceNow is a very powerful tool and with power comes complexity. It's divided up well, and I have experience updating tickets in it. In my opinion, it can do a lot, although some people think that it should do a lot more.

I'm not convinced that it should be the source of truth for everything. Some people promote it as the source of truth, but in networking automation, there are multiple sources of truth. For example, Active Directory is your user source of truth. IPM is your IP source of truth. The ticketing system has access to a lot of things, but does it need to be, and should it be the source of truth for something? I don't think so.

I think that it should pull from other places and be a collection of sources of truth. It's not the source of truth for users, it uses users. It's not the source of truth for devices, as devices are managed elsewhere. However, some people try to force it to you be that source of truth. I think that following such advice can lead to trouble.

Again, it's a very complex system and you can make it do whatever you want. It's just a matter of getting it to react the way you want it to.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

We are an integrator. We help our clients to implement ServiceNow for their companies.

The most valuable features generally depend on our client's needs, but most often it's some type of basic setup like incident management, request fulfillment, SLAs, problem management, change of management, and knowledge management.

In other cases, it can be something like an ITBM suite. Currently, we are implementing project management and Scaled Agile Framework for one of our customers.

It actually has quite a wide list of modules and processes.

There are Virtual Task Boards in the tool in the latest releases. There are many of them in the Scaled Agile Framework. There is some room there for improvement. It's really quite promising but, at the same time, it could be improved and I believe it will be improved soon.

The solution is quite stable. It's actually a big platform with a lot of plugins and a lot of things being introduced in each version. Sometimes there is not enough information about releases. For example, right now we have an issue understanding what the roadmap is for the Scaled Agile Framework.

It's very scalable. It's good, really good. I have experience working with other IT solutions like HPE/Micro Focus, and ServiceNow, in this regard, is all in the cloud. There are no issues thinking about the physical infrastructure. So it's very good.

Sometimes it limits you. For example, in CIS, they had a lot of issues working with a SaaS, but generally it is good.

I haven't had a chance to check technical support myself, but my colleagues say it could be faster. But in comparison to my previous experience with HPE/Micro Focus, ServiceNow is the same. It's good but it could be better.

When I was first assigned to this position and added to the team, and entered the ServiceNow world, this product and its use for clients were already ongoing. It was not new to the other members of the team. I was the newbie here. I checked out some training materials and I had some previous experience in the ITSM world. I just onboarded and started playing this role. It was pretty simple for me personally.

For the company, I can't comment on the initial setup because ServiceNow was here before me.

For the particular client we're working on, I joined the project last summer and it finished this summer. Before that, it had been ongoing for a year or year-and-a-half. But it was a big implementation, ten or 12 modules implemented.

In terms of the implementation strategy, there is most often a need in the client's company and they ask us to do a preliminary assessment and some onsite discovery. After the discovery, we build a prototype and finish the requirements-gathering. Then comes the implementation part which is mostly done through an Agile approach. After that there is testing on our side and user-acceptance testing on the client's side. Finally, it is released.

Speaking in light of my previous experience with HPE, at that time, around 2012 or so, if ServiceNow was a bit cheaper it would have had a good chance of our company choosing it at that time.

Now, ServiceNow is a leader and its pricing is quite good, quite competitive. If it were cheaper it would probably be better in this market niche.

Sometimes some plugins are not priced reasonably but, generally, the platform itself, its modules, are priced reasonably.

Long ago, when our company itself was choosing a platform, a solution for the company to support, there was a big analysis effort and investigation of what was on the market. Back then we chose HPE. But that was really long ago and it's not relevant to my activities and my experience currently.

My advice would be not to try to implement it by yourself. You could spend a lot of time without any considerable outcome.

We have ten clients right now and some of them have 1,000 users, all together. They have 20 to 50 engineers.

Deployment and maintenance on the client's size and their requirements: how quickly they want the implementation done, and on how many people create tickets, etc. The basic team is five to seven people who implement Service Now. For support of the solution, it's a maximum of three to five people.

I would rate ServiceNow at about nine out of ten. One of the things to be improved is their transparency in working with partners. Being a partner of ServiceNow, sometimes it's not clear how we should check for new updates; for example, this Scaled Agile Framework, etc. Working with HPE was more transparent for me. I had good communication points to address questions, not on the support level but on a higher level, to get answers to questions quite quickly and informatively.

We are a large integrator with more than 20,000 IT engineers. We work with many vendors including HPE, Micro Focus, Oracle, and some dozen other vendors.

For our company, it would be incident management with the ability to track and report on that. Showing trends and then tying that into problem management as well. Also completing the whole circle, so problem management and change management. Having one system of record that everything is all tied together and you can connect the dots all the way around through the lifecycle.

Being at the help desk, we see trends and incidence from which we can create a problem to track a larger issue because it's effecting more than one user or more than one location for our restaurants. From there, we run down root cause of what's actually causing this problem to happen. Then from that the developers will kick off change requests to permanently fix the problem. But if you don't have the incident management to replace or the ability to report and trend, then you never know that problem's happening because we have a really quick fix that we do all the time. So being able to see that trending and get ahead of the problems and get them out of the environment makes everyone's life easier.

From our perspective, it's the ability to customize it and provide the different platforms. A good example is that within our organization we have incident forms that are tailored to IT and we have incident forms that are tailored to other groups, like accounting supply chain. They're using the exact same incident form, but they're customizing the fields that show up based on their groups so that they get the experience and reporting they need out of the product, but we're all using one system of record and one form to do that in so we can report holistically.

The other part of that is from a customer and restaurant facing standpoint, we can build out those seamless pages, create custom portals for the restaurants, because obviously the IT view or the back end users view is not what a customer wants to experience. It lets us create that front end view for a customer to get what they need and still have that logic to the system for it to flow through and everything.

I think some of the areas for improvement are some of the features that get added sometimes and not a lot of help and resources get devoted to them. A good example is inside of my self-service portal, we use heavily utilizing the wizards that will actually walk users through a guided experience, asking questions, giving responses to lead them where they want to go because in the restaurant industry not everyone wants to fill out forms. They just want to be led by the hand. They're hired to run restaurants, not run computers. So, there's very little documentation on how to use them and how to build them. It's kind of one of the features that got put in but never really expounded upon because it's not been used a lot. So, we really taught ourselves how to use them.

The other one would be what I'm looking at now which is coaching loops. Very little documentation. Very little understanding of how it works. Again, learning it on my own because the book explains this is kind of the fields and what they do, but very little as far as actually using it as available. I would say sometimes they're great features, and they're great additions, but if there's not a lot of user adoption, then not a lot of documentation gets written for them.

We've been on ServiceNow for about four and a half, almost five years, and we've just upgraded to Geneva.

I think the only issue we've had is our recent upgrade to Geneva went a little wonky. But I think that was partially our fault. We had gotten a little bit behind on patching Fuji and then jumped to Geneva Patch 5. I think there was items missed. Even though it should have been cumulative, I think we had some items that were missed in there.

The other issue we had is when we deployed ServiceNow, we started with domain separation. Mostly because the consulting company we used said that's the only way to do it. It probably shouldn't have been done, but that's not a reflection of the product as much as the consultants we used at the time.

We used Altiris. Maintaining Altiris servers was getting very expensive. They were hosted locally. We had a very old version of Altiris. We never kept up with the new version, so it never went to the cloud. So very old, very hard to maintain. The admin we had at the time was retiring. But probably the biggest standpoint was how limited Altiris was. You really could not customize it. If you wanted to build reporting, you had to have a sequel admin do it for you because there was no user interface for reporting. It was the system sped out the sequel queries that it was told to do, but you had to write them in sequel. So, it was not very user friendly.

I think in some ways we probably bit off more than we should have chewed, but we needed the product to replace Altiris. We had to fill that gap because of everything it did. From a stability standpoint, it was probably on the verge of collapse. We had to put a product in place to take it's place.

We worked with ServiceNow directly now, but during the implementation, we found a third party to do it for us. We were involved, but we also relied heavily on that third party consultant because Altiris had been the only thing we knew for so long that this was a complete change. It was our huge step forward.

Don't look at ServiceNow as what it can do for whatever department you're in, but try to get some buy in higher up in the organization because the more foundation and different groups you can get into ServiceNow at the beginning, the easier it is for the adoption. It really can become something for the entire organization. Getting that buy in from the beginning helps it grow a little faster.

If you've got 5 different groups that will be in it from the beginning, then some of the choices you're going to make are going to be a little bit different and they're going to be a little more future planned than, "I just need this for me". So, it's probably the biggest advice I can give is try to plan for the future.

I've seen other products. I've seen some of the stuff that they can do. Really haven't seen one that can, at least in my mind, replace our ServiceNow for everything that we've put into it, everything that we've done. It would be a very hard thing to do.

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.