HishamTarek - PeerSpot reviewer
UNIX and DevOps Team Leader at ALEXBANK
Real User
A highly stable solution that can integrate with other products to automate workflows
Pros and Cons
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

We use ServiceNow for help desks.

What is most valuable?

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

What needs improvement?

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

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using ServiceNow for more than three years.

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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

I rate ServiceNow ten out of ten for stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

What other advice do I have?

Overall, I rate ServiceNow an eight out of ten.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Mangesh Shaharkar - PeerSpot reviewer
TM at Tech Mahindra Limited
Real User
Top 10
A versatile platform with efficient workflow automation and extensive customization capabilities that streamlines business processes, enhances collaboration, and offers comprehensive IT service manage
Pros and Cons
  • "It's a straightforward and effective approach that minimizes the need for extensive explanations."
  • "It should enhance its offerings by providing the chance to obtain course certifications at an affordable fee."

What is our primary use case?

I have been exploring the wireless designer service on ServiceNow.

How has it helped my organization?

Although verbal explanations may be challenging, I can provide detailed comments and notes in the code. This facilitates collaborative learning in the catalog domain, making understanding various efforts and products simpler.

What is most valuable?

It's a straightforward and effective approach that minimizes the need for extensive explanations. It streamlines business processes, enhances efficiency, and fosters collaboration through its comprehensive platform, offering notable advantages in IT service management, automation, and customizable applications.

What needs improvement?

It should enhance its offerings by providing the chance to obtain course certifications at an affordable fee. The functionality of the mobile application is still not entirely clear or optimized. The UI of the mobile application needs improvement.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been working with it for two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It provides good stability. I would rate it eight out of ten.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The technology is growing rapidly. I would rate its scalability capabilities ten out of ten.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. I would rate it nine out of ten.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The cost is quite high. I would rate it ten out of ten in terms of pricing.

What other advice do I have?

Overall, I would rate it ten out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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March 2024
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Ashish  Paikrao - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at Pathlock
Real User
Top 5Leaderboard
Provides stable management of digital workflow with good scalability capabilities
Pros and Cons
  • "It allows us to filter the data, create graphs, and get detailed reports."
  • "The pricing structure could be more budget-friendly."

What is our primary use case?

We utilize it as a ticketing tool for the customer support team. It helps us manage digital workflow and possible incident alerts.

What is most valuable?

Many features are valuable. It allows us to filter the data, create graphs, and get detailed reports.

What needs improvement?

The pricing structure could be more budget-friendly.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using it for two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It provides scalability.

How are customer service and support?

They provide good support for their customers.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

The deployment process was executed quickly and easily, including setup and repair testing. It was done in a few hours by our technical team. We implemented our real-time data analytics application into the system, ran a test and after it created alerts, we passed on the alert reports to the designated team for evaluation.

What was our ROI?

We have seen a positive return on investment. The solution is worth the value for the pricing.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It is fairly expensive.

What other advice do I have?

I am satisfied with the solution. I would rate it nine out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Other
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
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Lars Schmidt - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Consultant at Sydbank
Real User
Intuitive and easy to understand with helpful technical support
Pros and Cons
  • "It's actually easy to understand."
  • "Their GUI could be updated."

What is most valuable?

Overall, I've been satisfied with the product.

I've found the solution to be scalable.

The stability has been good overall. The performance is reliable. 

It's mostly an intuitive product. It's actually easy to understand. 

Technical support is decent. They are helpful when we have issues. 

What needs improvement?

The pricing could be lowered. It's pretty high.

We have had a few issues with the Agent Client Collector setup, however, that's probably at our end for some network blocking reason, or something like that.

Their GUI could be updated. It's a little bit old-looking right now. 

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using the solution for three or so years now. 

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The solution is stable and the performance is good. there aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash. It's reliable. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The product is scalable. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. It's not a problem.

How are customer service and support?

Technical support has been fine. We are happy with their level of service in general. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The price is high. However, I don't pay for it. I'm just an employee. I can't speak to the exact costs. That said, I know it's an expensive product.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

While we are working with ServiceNow, we are looking into Device42 to see if that could be used for scanning our infrastructure right now.

What other advice do I have?

While I have used ServiceNow for some time, I'm not an expert. I was sort of admin in a previous company where I worked, however, now I'm only, more or less, a user of ServiceNow. I'm a consultant. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten, based on my overall experience. 

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Bruno Pires - PeerSpot reviewer
ServiceNow Architect & Tech Manager at TRH
Reseller
Very easy deployment with excellent technical support
Pros and Cons
  • "Very easy to implement and to respond to my clients' needs."
  • "The high price is a huge barrier in Portugal."

What is our primary use case?

I implement ServiceNow for our customers. I'm a reseller and we are partners of ServiceNow. I'm the company business developer.

What is most valuable?

From my point of view, it's the best solution in the market. It's so easy to implement, the ratio of days to implement is the lowest in the market; I can respond to all the needs of my clients. Based on my experience with BMC and EasyVista, ServiceNow is the best solution.

What needs improvement?

The price is a huge barrier in the Portugese market when it comes to implementing ServiceNow.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've been using this solution for 10 years. 

How are customer service and support?

Technical support is the best because they respond quickly. They have good SLAs to respond to our tickets with the correct priorities, it's very well defined. Compared with other suppliers, it's fantastic.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is very easy. Based on my experience with BMC and EasyVista, ServiceNow is the easiest solution to implement.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Licensing costs are the highest in the market. It's difficult to sell in Portugal, but for the rest of Europe, it's easy to sell because we can easily justify the value that the customer will gain from the product.

What other advice do I have?

It's important to understand all the components of the solution. After that, with the base knowledge, it's easy to implement. It also helps to have some knowledge about processes based on the ITIL and ISO 20000. It's most important to become familiar with that to implement the solution.

I rate the solution nine out of 10. 

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: partner
PeerSpot user
Senior System Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Real User
A lot of inherent complexity, but it is stable, powerful, and feature-rich
Pros and Cons
  • "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."

What is our primary use case?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What is most valuable?

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

What needs improvement?

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

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and technical support?

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

How was the initial setup?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user458997 - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager of Helpdesk at Bloomin' Brands
Vendor
Provides one system of record and you can connect the dots all the way through the lifecycle.

What is most valuable?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

For how long have I used the solution?

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

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

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.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What about the implementation team?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
it_user459114 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr Software Engineer at Southwest Airlines
Real User
We've been able to finally implement a CMDB.

What is most valuable?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

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.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free ServiceNow Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: March 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free ServiceNow Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.