ServiceNow CMDB Reviews

We primarily use ServiceNow for asset management. We feed our on-prem and cloud inventory into ServiceNow CMDB. We also use it for event management together with Micro Focus Operations Bridge Manager. 

One important element is automation. We can back up and manage multiple configurations. It also enables password self-service. 

We have various service levels and SLAs for our customers like platinum, gold, etc. Each SLA has an associated hardware and computing configuration. We cannot define that in ServiceNow for each customer. For example, a customer with 100 servers might be in the platinum category while a client with 25 would be in gold. 

We use Terraform for infrastructure automation on the cloud. The logical mapping in ServiceNow needs to be improved. The logical mapping is limited to the OS layer. I installed a database and one application on top of that. 

I have used ServiceNow CMDB for five years.

I rate ServiceNow eight out of 10 for stability. 

ServiceNow CMDB is easy to scale. We have options. About 700 customers use it. 

I rate ServiceNow support five out of 10. We need to contact them when we want to customize the product for our customers. That takes a little time. Under our support agreement, we get a fast response if we have other issues, but the customization requests take longer.

Setting up ServiceNow CMDB is straightforward. 

I rate ServiceNow eight out of 10 for affordability. The pricing is optimal. 

I rate ServiceNow CMDB nine out of 10.

CMDB provides a centralized repository for your assets and support representatives throughout the organization.

It depends on the implementation, but the out-of-the-box product tends to be fixed on the support people. From a linear standpoint, I would like to see a certain number of fields on a table and a related list to describe the support personnel.

You can specify leads and responsible personnel. If there were a related list with the job function responsibility and that person's user ID, it could be a dynamic list instead of a fixed one where we have to create columns on a table. I would like to see that functionality out of the box. 

I have used CMDB for five years.

I rate CMDB nine out of 10. ServiceNow products are stable overall. 

I think the scalability is excellent because of the way it's implemented. That said, I would like to see tighter integration with Active Directory, so we get automated reports as people join or leave the organization. That is something we can develop, but it would be nice to have that out of the box.

I rate CMDB seven out of 10 for ease of setup. You have to go through discovery to populate your assets and build out the relationships. That's normal. It takes some additional work, and every installation is different. 

The initial deployment is pretty quick, but the configuration takes additional time, and you need some buy-in from other departments. That process varies. It might be straightforward, or it can be the roadblock to getting things done correctly.

The setup may involve 10  to 15 people because you may need to reach out to other teams to get the data you need. If you're doing a standard deployment that's simply laying the foundation and you have all the information ahead of time, you could get this done in under a month. That's allowing time to address any issues or necessary configuration changes.

I rate ServiceNow CMDB eight out of 10. The foundation is good, but there's always room for improvement.  I think they're addressing the issues, so I'll give them an eight to be on the positive side. CMDB is your foundation. If you get that right, it makes the rest of your ServiceNow deployment go easier.

I use ServiceNow for tracking infrastructure procurement and all the configuration items on a particular network. It tracks the maintenance and everything related to configuration management. We have about 20,000 employees and a team of personnel that works with ServiceNow.

Everything is now in one system. Employees submit service and change requests. It all goes through ServiceNow.

I deal mostly with asset management, and ServiceNow helps me do my job more effectively. 

I'm still learning about CMDB's capabilities, so I haven't seen anything that I want added yet. 

I've been working with ServiceNow since January.

ServiceNow is stable.

I don't have admin rights, so I can't do anything to affect a lot of change in the scalability. I only deal with the asset management part, and I haven't had any problems adding to the system. When assets come within my particular AO, my task is to add them to the configuration management database, and I haven't had any issues.

We previously used CyrusOne for configuration management. We switched to ServiceNow, the platform of choice for our client, and they want everyone to be on the same page. At the same time, ServiceNow does everything we want to do and has room for growth. 

Setting up ServiceNow was straightforward. We had a smooth onboarding process, and they provided training for the system admins as part of the package for this system and implementation.

I rate ServiceNow CMDB nine out of 10. I recommend ServiceNow because it meets all our configuration management needs. It gives us everything that we need to have based on our IT requirements.

We use ServiceNow CMDB mainly for all the CIs. For example, we have to show assets for desktops. We actually can get the last logged-in instance through our SCCM product from Microsoft. We can run that actual report against all asset inventories, and that provides us with information on who the last user is and which device is actually in use.
That's been one of our audit control measures just through referencing all our CIs. Also, if we have any change tickets, any incidents, we can register that against the CI. Then, we can see the profile, how many tickets have been in place with regard to different environments, and the different hardware components.

It has improved our organization by bringing about quite a bit of automation so that we don't have to manually take inventory.

We can also quickly filter a query along different avenues to find out how many models we have in place.

We use that also against our Qualys vulnerability scans and patching scans, where the tool has really assisted us in streamlining multiple processes.

It integrates with so many different things.

ServiceNow CMDB assisted us in streamlining multiple processes.

We do some of the programming for the queries and tables, and maybe some of that could be out of the box.

I wish we didn't have to pay for additional modules. For example, the vulnerability module is at an additional cost so that we can pull the Qualys scans and actually have automated tickets involved. If that workflow can also be part of that, it would be nice.

It would be good if there's a logic that we've already closed or for which we've mitigated the vulnerability that it would automatically close an incident ticket. We still have to put logic to and build some programming or code for this at present.

I've been using this solution for at least four to five years.

It's highly available, and we haven't had any issues with it.

We have an application team, a database team, that takes care of the maintenance and provides firmware updates, etc.

We're not really a large organization; we have approximately 1,500 employees. It's perfect for us.

ServiceNow CMDB is used extensively by our IT infrastructure teams.

We used ConnectWise before, but it was actually larger and was a pretty enterprise beefy solution.

It is good to have a solid coder or programmer who understands the database and knows how to set up these queries because once that's in place, there's just a phenomenal amount of information that you can use for data and for decision making and planning. I highly recommend that.

For what we use it for, ServiceNow CMDB really works out well, and I wouldn't recommend any other type of service solution.

I would rate it at nine on a scale from one to ten.

ServiceNow CMDB is fully integrated and complete. ServiceNow has modules for everything an IT service company needs, and it's flexible. 

While ServiceNow CMDB is flexible and comprehensive, it's also difficult to implement and requires a lot of customization. 

In order to fully leverage ServiceNow CMDB, you need ServiceNow Discovery and some other ServiceNow solutions. It's expensive to purchase all of these. We're negotiating with ServiceNow, but we're thinking about replacing it with another CMDB solution. 

I have used ServiceNow CMDB for six years.

I rate ServiceNow CMDB five out of 10 for ease of setup. The installation was complex in our organization because we are providing services to many other companies. The plain vanilla implementation should be easy. If you need to customize the solution, you must have people who understand how to do that. ts.

One manager and four data analysts oversee ServiceNow. Their job is to do customizations. When we onboard new clients, we have to customize ServiceNow to meet their requirements. We set up separate workflows on various instances for each client. It requires little maintenance if you aren't customizing it. 

I rate ServiceNow CMDB two out of 10 for affordability.  The licensing model is complex. Due to contract restrictions, I'm unable to see how much we pay, but it's calculated based on the number of users, modules, and license types. 

I rate ServiceNow CMDB seven out of 10. It's a complete solution, and it's ideal if you have a complex environment. However, before implementing something as complicated and costly as ServiceNow, you should consider if you need it. 

A simpler, less expensive solution might work fine for you. If you only need basic CMDB features, such as registering incidents and changes, other tools are much simpler than ServiceNow. A large organization with complex requirements will get the most value out of ServiceNow. 

We use it for network and server discovery, and storage.

I like ServiceNow's credential-based discovery.

Integration is complicated and requires advance scripting and customization to complete it.

It would be good to have the ability to customize the UI.

I've been using ServiceNow CMDB for a year.

It is a stable solution.

I would rate ServiceNow's scalability at eight out of ten.

Technical support staff take two to three days to respond to queries. Therefore, I would give them a five out of ten.

Neutral

The initial setup is easy, and all functions are built-in. It took about a week to set up.

We chose ServiceNow because it has more functionalities. It takes at least one week to be trained on ServiceNow, and it is easy to learn.

There are multiple plugins and integrations available in ServiceNow CMDB, and we can build the environment that we want. Therefore, I would rate this solution at eight on a scale from one to ten.

I've used it for managing client inventories and infrastructure to ensure that the relationship among various CIs is managed. I've also used it to troubleshoot quickly and handle change.

It's not too difficult to configure with regard to the UI. My experience working with ServiceNow CMDB has been a very comfortable one.

Definitely, the price needs to be lower because there are clients that I work with who cannot afford ServiceNow. I have to end up proposing alternate solutions to fit their budget.

I've worked with this solution for about six years now.

It is mostly a cloud solution.

It is a stable solution.

It is scalable.

When we needed help, they've always been available. We've not had issues though.

You do need skilled people for the initial setup, but it's not too difficult to work with.

Typically, the deployment of ServiceNow for the various organizations that we have worked with has spanned between one to three months.

We are integrators ourselves and implemented it.

In comparison to the cost of other solutions, you get value for your money with ServiceNow CMDB. It could definitely be cheaper though.

ServiceNow is very intuitive and is a market leader. I used to use BMC Remedy before, which had a traditional type of deployment. ServiceNow is quick to start up because it's on the cloud. It has ready-to-use use cases available for deployment. So, the deployment is much faster than it used to be on Remedy. 

There's a whole lot of automation that comes with ServiceNow, so I'd definitely recommend it.

At present, I would rate ServiceNow at ten on a scale from one to ten.

ServiceNow CMDB is not being used that much in the company. It's being used by customers, and mostly 90% are enterprise customers. The tool is used by many for IT assets, for example, PCs, printers, and applications. It's not just used for trouble ticketing. ServiceNow CMDB is used to manage the entire IT asset.

As I work based on the IT governance framework, what I like best about ServiceNow CMDB is ITSM, so incident/service request management. I also like that it can be useful for project portfolio management.

An area for improvement in ServiceNow is the reporting because there are reporting features that would be better when done within the platform, rather than having to buy the performance analytics model. There is a greater difference between the dashboarding that you can do from the platform versus what's on the performance analytics model. Some of the features currently available within performance analytics would be good to have within the platform because sometimes, customers will say that the tool is okay, but it's not enough, so you'll need to go with the performance analytics model, and that's costly.

The problem is that paying extra for performance analytics costs too much for what it can give back. Customers don't need the entire functionality delivered by performance analytics, but the default functionalities within the platform are not enough. There is always a trade-off. Customers are not getting value for money paid for the performance analytics model because they don't use the whole set of functionalities, and that is the problem.

For the time being, there isn't an additional feature I'd like to see in the next release of the tool.

I've been using ServiceNow CMDB for six years now.

ServiceNow CMDB is a very stable solution.

Technical support for ServiceNow was perfect. They provided a very high level of support.

The market sees ServiceNow as the Ferrari in terms of pricing. It's at the very top, and its cost is very, very high. If a customer is considering an alternative platform due to pricing, so I looked at Jira. It's clear that ServiceNow provides much more, but sometimes, you need a trade-off between customer requirements and what's on the platform.

If customers were to switch from ServiceNow to Jira, it would be because of pricing. Feature-wise, the two are almost equivalent. Everything you find in Jira, you can find in ServiceNow, but not everything you find in ServiceNow is in Jira, especially in terms of flexibility. One of the key points of ServiceNow is that when you want to downscale and you belong in a smaller organization, it becomes too costly. Pricing may change more in ServiceNow and ManageEngine, for example, but not that much in Jira. Downscaling in ServiceNow for a smaller organization is too costly, so they need to create a shrink-wrapped package specifically for smaller organizations, rather than delivering too much and costing too much.

On a scale of one to five, with one being the worst pricing, and five being competitively priced, in particular, not cheap, but competitively priced, I'm scoring ServiceNow a two because it's very expensive in the marketplace. If they can make some changes to their pricing packages, it would be much better.

I use ServiceNow CMDB, but understand that I work in a delivery company, a service company. The company drafted a partnership with ServiceNow six years ago and is still a partner, particularly a premier partner.

I'm giving ServiceNow CMDB the best score, ten out of ten.

I'm looking at ServiceNow from the standpoint of things like technical services, business services, mapping, deployments, rolling up inventory to those mapped deployments, and doing application services, which takes your inventory and spreads it across all your instantiations.

We are more oriented toward cost control and multiple instantiations of the same product across multiple locations; basically, multiple data setting environments to thousands of deployments.

We'll deploy to our customers and host their equipment. Our customers subscribe to our equipment and we sell our software, but rarely do we sell our software. Basically, our customers pay us monthly to host their software and keep it updated. Our huge customers, companies like Bank of America and Wells Fargo kind of huge, get us to host their equipment. Otherwise, for smaller clients, run on our ASP configuration.

ServiceNow CMDB is just something that you could track everything on. For example, I can service a company with 50,000 employees with hundreds of thousands of servers.

ServiceNow was a platform that they wanted to sell as a development platform, but it didn't have a lot of traction there. So, they basically built a ticketing system because Remedy was a sad environment at the time and they built the next great Aon. ServiceNow is basically a go-to when it comes to Remedy and ticket management. The idea is that CMDB is to track all your assets, how you handle them, how you back them up, how you secure them, and which agents you have on them. To be able to do all that, keep it in the CMDB.

There are areas that could be improved, but that's a longer discussion. It all depends on what you are looking to do with it and then it becomes an issue of how do you configure the CMDB accordingly.  If I were to make one set of suggestions it would be how we defined deployments which would link back to instantiations.  Deployments would need to handle varying degrees of customization and granularity that integrate with Application Services and Business Applications.

I started dealing with ServiceNow back in the days of version D, which was seven years ago. I'm now on version P.

It is stable as hell, but it is always about what are you trying to do with your CMDB to make your company a quicker, faster, and more viable entity in your work or industry.

The initial setup can run anywhere from complex – meaning that you're doing contract management and looking for contract renewals and SLA achievement across contract structures – to just making sure your server has backup.

For one of our current customers, they have prepared the CMDB by manually importing the JIRA data from their existing infrastructure —the data module, services, servers, application servers, database, database container, and database data—and they've asked us to handle the application business. 

The customer has two repositories. The first is for modeling the application architecture. The second is for delivery management as well as integrating the data between the release control platform and our platform for business applications. And from this one, we support only the relationships between the CIs and we have produced a mapping to update the relationship between all the CIs.

In the past, when working for a banking client, we adopted two different types of deployments based on our customer's needs. The first one was improvised and the second one was in the cloud. We had to do mapping between discovery and the CMDB service BMC because they did not previously have CMDB or ServiceNow. We closed the assets activity between BMC and ServiceNow platform. 

We have thousands of users engaged in a wide range of activities around the solution, such as the infrastructure and request management team. We're working with many plugins and a lot of features.

I like ServiceNow CMDB's discovery tools. If you have discovery tools and the discovery tools are built around a philosophy of mapping, then we can implement a top-down architectural mapping of the elements in the upper structure and create your CI. We can directly map for the dependencies among your infrastructure, hardware, and software. If you do not have discovery tools, we can still populate the CMDB but for the administrator, it's very hard.

There's room for improvement in terms of integration. When we integrate a customer's foundational data, we get the core of their business from the integration. Because the process is not done through scripting, getting elected in the administrative solution can have value.  But with ServiceNow, there is sometimes an added risk for the workflow in the activity.

About five years. We started with the Eureka release in 2016. After that, we upgraded to Fiji and our most recent upgrade is Geneva. I'm not a specialist in ServiceNow. I am an IT service management consultant. I advise on all activities concerning the best practice of ETL process. I am involved in the CMS configuration. I coordinate activity between asset management and discovery within the CMDB, but the scripting on the platform is not my task. In the bank, I have offshore teams for development from my side.

ServiceNow is a stable solution. 

We have a philosophy for IT service management. When we create your infrastructure, we don't change the core. We can build an overlay on your process but we don't change the core of the process. When we update the solution, we generally update the core.  

Support is good. We have an in-house specialist, and if they have a workaround, we will use that.  But sometimes we'll still need to escalate to ServiceNow support. Generally, if we have a solution, we apply the solution, and we don't need to create a support ticket.

Before ServiceNow, I used BMC. From my point of view, BMC is the best. BMC is a solution rooted in best practices. At the moment, there are a lot of ServiceNow developers, but they have no understanding of the impact of the services. They're looking to develop a new plugin before understanding the best practices of how to use it in the short version. The solution is mature, and they have a lot of modules. Maturity comes into play when customers need to develop something. But sometimes when we develop some root system, there can be a drift on your platform. When there is a drift on your platform, the impact on the application is great sometimes. We can lose some functionality after the update. 

We use a common model— a generic collection. If you respect the common model, implementing CMDB is seamless. But if we don't respect the common model, it can complicate the relationship between CIs. However, using the common model, you can achieve a seamless mapping of the infrastructure with your CMDB.  Generally, it takes a couple of months to populate a CMDB depending on the scope. For example, we might start with the servers, and after that, we can look at the software, then the databases, and the middleware applications for application servers, networking, and storage.

It takes a long time to deploy depending on the volume of the infrastructure. It takes a lot longer if you have thousands of servers. Some elements of our procedure apply more for small businesses and others for big ones. In the bank, we have a big discovery process. We have thousands of elements in our city and hundreds of data centers. Implementation at the bank took more than a month just to activate all data in one building.

I have no idea about the pricing of the solution. Two or three years ago, they changed the model. Now you can access ServiceNow CMDB with a nominal license. Before we can gave all users an IQ profile to access the CMDB core. I think they have changed it a few times since.

If you are implementing ServiceNow or any CMDB solution, you have to start by properly sizing up the scope. We start at the level of the server and application, then look at the network. And after looking at the network, we turn to storage infrastructure. By working step by step, we can read your infrastructure to develop the topology of the infrastructure in your CMDB. We cannot start from scratch. It's not likely that we can build a CMDB in just a few days.

All in all, I would rate ServiceNow CMBD eight out of 10.