ServiceNow CMDB Reviews

When I was a student, I worked on a prototype for an app, and my main tasks were directly in CMDB. I had done a synchronization implementation to retrieve inventories from Excel files and put them into CMDB with automation.

I also used it in my previous company. This company is a supplier of ServiceNow for several clients in Canada and the USA, and we did a lot of customization and configuration for the clients. We worked with all ServiceNow platforms and not only with CMDB. If you want ServiceNow within your company, you've got to find a supplier or go with ServiceNow directly. 

It was on-premises, but ServiceNow is cloud-based. It is software as a platform. 

It helped us to synchronize some of the files containing the inventory of assets. 

The most valuable feature of ServiceNow is the user interface because you can customize or configure it directly from the user interface by using the mouse. It is easy to use even for non-IT people.

You can also directly plug your ServiceNow instance within your Microsoft Active Directory and then retrieve all your users and groups. So, you can use the users and groups to put automation inside the application. When you have new hires, you can automate the group security and group attribution.

It is very good in terms of performance. Its performance is almost 100%. Once, it took less than two minutes to back up and run an instance. It has very good reliability.

They can improve the mobile application and the TGO tool, which is a built-in tool for development and implementation. As a developer, it is very frustrating to configure or customize the mobile app. In my opinion, this part of the application needs full rework and re-engineering.

I have been using this solution for three years.

It is stable with very good reliability. Its performance is almost 100%. ServiceNow has very high standards.

It is very scalable. You will be able to scale it irrespective of the size of the infrastructures. It should work with really big IT infrastructure. You can adapt it for every kind of infrastructure. You can work with Windows infrastructure as well as with Linux infrastructure. You can do pretty much what you want with it. However, you can't do any implementations that are not ITIL compliant.

In terms of users, you might have an IT project manager, user services people, supervisors, and contract managers. ServiceNow provides Service Catalog to add every user of your company. You will add them into CMDB as assets. The real users are only the IT people of the company who have a license to use the backend.

Its usage is growing, and it is being used more and more. When I worked with it for the first time, I was not aware that you can also manage contracts with it. For me, it was just an ITSM solution with CMDB workflow, etc. In the last year, I have seen clients saying that they would like to add the Contracts module to manage their contracts within the platform. It is being used more widely now because you can do contract management and service catalog. You can also do IT support within the platform. It can be used as a ticketing tool.

I have interacted with the technical support of ServiceNow only twice. It is very easy to contact them. You log into the client portal, and you can send them the query or request. In my previous job, I was kind of providing support for our customers, and the company I was working for was kind of an interface between ServiceNow and clients.

It has a big community, which is a very cool thing about the ServiceNow platform. There is a lot of community and developer information. You can open a ticket directly with ServiceNow to ask them for new features or new releases, and they do respond.

It is really easy to deploy and add features. There are two ways of adding features inside the platform. You can go via their own built-in tools for developments or via the repository store. Basically, when you first start making changes inside an instance, there will be a tool to capture the modifications. When you are done with the modification, you close the repository and deploy it to the next instance. For instance, you would have one development instance, one pre-production instance, and one live or production instance. After you make a change in the development instance, you close the development repository and upload it to the pre-production instance. After that, you can do quality assurance, and if all is good, you can just deploy it to the production instance. It is really easy to work with.

Once you have your license, you can deploy it in five minutes, but it also depends on whether you are moving from an existing system to ServiceNow. In such a case, you will have to move your assets from your old system to the new system. I don't really have the experience of doing this, but, from my point of view, for a company with 20K employees, it will take eight months to one year to plan it and achieve it. There is a lot of work that you need to do before deploying it.

For its deployment, you would need an ITIL expert because ServiceNow is built around ITIL. You would also need a ServiceNow administrator, and you might require a project manager depending on the size of the enterprise.

In terms of maintenance, you don't have to do anything because all updates are mandatory, and they are deployed by ServiceNow. When you purchase the ServiceNow license, you agree to them updating it. You can choose the date on which you want to update. They don't force you to update it at a fixed date unless there is a security failure or a big issue. They send an email to your ServiceNow administrator or a message on the portal. You can then choose a date. They take care of the update, and you don't have to do anything. However, if you're located in Quebec or Canada and you are dealing with both French and English UI, you may have to do some maintenance after each update. Every time I saw an update, I had to deal with a problem related to translation in French, but it happened only in Quebec. I did not see this in France, and I don't know why.

I'm not 100% certain. My boss, who was kind of a ServiceNow director, used to think that we were making a profit with the solution, but I don't think it was a direct financial profit. It was more in terms of becoming more efficient. For instance, the whole user service department worked better with this platform.

It is really expensive. I don't know actually how much it costs, but in 2016, when a client decided to move from an old solution to ServiceNow and had to choose a supplier for ServiceNow, I had heard that it could cost $10 per hour, which is really expensive. 

I am not aware of any additional fees to the standard licensing fees. There is no standard ServiceNow solution. When a company wants to acquire ServiceNow, they already know which module they will choose. In a basic package, you would have Service Catalog, Incident Management, and Change Management. These modules are usually required in an IT company.

I would advise others to go for it. I would also recommend having at least one ServiceNow administrator in the company who is certified. Its certification is not very difficult to get. If you have an IT degree, you can go for it very easily.

I would rate ServiceNow CMDB an eight out of ten in spite of the fact that it was a bit frustrating to work with as a developer.

Implemented into DWP to manage all technical towers including the EUC tower that manages 120,000 x users. 

The biggest benefactors are the financial team in delivering financial controls and transparency of asset transactions. The finance team can actually manage the asset, and the depreciation of the asset from cradle to grave. 

The Operational delivery teams benefit too from understanding what stock assets they have ready to support live operations - i.e. Assets operationally ready (Goldstock), assets under repair, assets under staging (Build Image install & Asset tag) & Assets under Disposal, Goods-in & RTB. Operational teams with viability of their Stock Management can deliver demand management, meet Service Request SLA targets (joiners and Leavers & Refresh) & Incident SLA targets (B&F Swap)

The Out of the Box (OOB) functionality where you can manage the hardware, asset and the whole stock management is very useful to me. 

As soon as you buy some assets by raising a PO, you can actually track it in the toolsuite. The asset is manage through the whole stock management life cycle. Then the asset becomes a live CI out on the network until it comes back into stock management as faulty or end-of-life. The returning assets it gets managed through stock management and either is re-cycled through repair and staging or follows the disposal route. 

The ServiceNow OOB toolsuite functionality allows you to manage the whole asset life cycle, which is really powerful.

The initial setup isn't too complicated.

The solution is extremely stable.

We've found the solution to be very scalable.

It replaces MS Excel spreadsheets as the tracking tool.

Within the CMDB and managing the assets, ServiceNow works really well. However, it needs to integrate with other toolsets, such as scanning tools. That way, you can bulk upload and bulk transfer assets between sort location and sort location. The E2E solution has a huge dependency on scanning tools and ServiceNow lacks integration with scanning tools. That is actually one of the biggest challenges.

I would like to see them partner with some key scanning technology companies to give them a real end-to-end offering.

I've used the solution for at least the last 18 months.

The solution is very stable and very reliable. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. The performance is very good. It underpins all the other protocols within the tool suite and it's very good.

ServiceNow has the scalability for enterprise products. It is the best in the market from what I see. A lot of my customers use other tool feeds such as My Top Desk and other options that are a lot smaller, so to speak. They do not have the out the Box functionality, for example. ServiceNow is definitely the leading product.

Over the last 10 years, I would say 90% of my clients have been using ServiceNow. Of the big organizations, 90% are using ServiceNow. The other 10% are smaller companies. If I deal with an SME, and they tend to go for a cheaper and smaller ServiceNow kind of product.

All positive.

Most organisations manage Stock Management utilising MS Excel spreadsheets or Google Docs which is very manual and results in non-accurate reporting and poor controls 

The initial setup isn't overly complex.  The out of the Box functionality is very straightforward. You do not need to do any software development. You can just use the Box functionality to manage the asset end to end.

Organisations need a resource overhead to manage Configuration Management of HAM & SAM either manually through spreadsheets or a SMTS such as ServiceNow. ServiceNow delivers OOB functionality that deliver huge operational efficiencies.

The solution does require maintenance. There needs to be an in-house team that will manage the maintenance. There is an annual big release, and likely quarterly releases as well, and maybe a patch release that would need to be managed. There is definitely a maintenance release cycle maintenance overhead.

Delivered through an external consultancy as a capex project 

Difficult to quantify, but enterprise organisation will get a payback with 3 years through operational efficiencies and financial regulatory reporting 

ServiceNow is expensive but you get what you pay for. Any organisation 5000 x seats and above will get pay-back from utilising the ServiceNow OOB functionality with best practise ITIL processes.

The biggest challenge and cost is the integration of scanning tools with ServiceNow

No - customer had bought and had been using ServiceNow for 3 x years without tapping into the true OOB functionality. The only real option was to implement the OOB servicenow functionality and capability.

Any organization with a user population of 5,000 and above should consider the product as they will get a return on investment. It's not just the cost of the licenses; it's all the maturity and the efficiencies and the capability that will give them a huge return on investment.

The management and control of information and the reporting capability is huge. 

I have worked across a number of customers, where they utilise other Service Management tool suites which do not have OOB functionality to assist the operational teams to manage stock management - this results in managing the process utilising MS Excel spreadsheets which results in poor information and management decisions.

 In general, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

We use the ServiceNow CMDB to keep track of users and assets.

We use it for ticketing. We use it for quite a few things. We have a Knowledge base. We do incidents, we do requests. The CMDB looks at assets — what's tracked if those assets are terminated in use? It pretty much does all of our backend processes. For instance, if there's a request for software on a machine, It looks at the CMDB, checks if that machine is real, and checks what assets are tied to it. Most importantly, it checks what buffer instances and asset tracking is tied to it.

Every user in our company has access to it, and it's a global company. If I had to estimate, I'd say there are roughly 80,000 to 100,000 users.

A lot of our users use it for simple tasks, like submitting incidents or creating requests. Since we outsourced the help desk, the help desk uses it for initial triage, escalation, etc. I use it for reporting asset tracking. Everyone has various uses for it.

There's a lot of automation capabilities. There are process flows in ServiceNow that Edge didn't have. It has a great system for queries. Currently, everyone needs to be on the right version of Windows 10. Being able to look at assets and see which ones are in use and which ones are using an incorrect version. It's easy to cross-check SCCM with what's in ServiceNow to see who that device is tied to, if it's in use or if it's retired because the CMDB keeps checking that.

All of their features are valuable. I primarily use it for ticket tracking and seeing what the trends are. I go in there and make sure all the work is getting done. Checking and seeing what assets are showing up, what versions of software they have on them. That's kind of how I've been using it lately.

ServiceNow CMDB is also very user-friendly and they offer plenty of good training.

ServiceNow CMDB is extremely customizable.

I have been using this solution for roughly one year

ServiceNow CMDB is both very scalable and stable. It's a good product.

ServiceNow CMDB works great for large and small businesses. If you're working with a vendor, just be sure it's a trusted vendor, and be sure to customize it how you want, not based on what the vendor typically does.

There are some little custom, customizable modules that you can integrate into ServiceNow, but I don't have too much experience with them. I work with our ServiceNow certified tech and he knows a little bit more about what features are available or what's coming out since he's involved with training.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give ServiceNow CMDB a rating of eight because it has everything I need to do my job.

I don't think it's a failure of Service Now or something that they don't offer, but I haven't seen any training modules. I feel like there are things that could be automated, but we just don't know how to go about doing it.

The solution has a single database, architecture, and data model. 

The tool is not user-friendly. It has a lot of features and you can get lost in it. 

I have been using the solution for six years. 

The solution is stable. 

There are about 250 users for the solution in our company. 

The product is pricey. 

I would rate the product a nine out of ten. The solution is easy to use. 

We use this solution to visualize the performance of all of our operation via a table that shows all of our critical surfaces.

We like that this solution allows us to easily track the relationship between our CI and the IT asset module, for troubleshooting purposes, or to check the impact of an incident site.

We would like the solution to be made more easily scalable in future updates.

We would also like to see more flexible pricing models made available that are tailored to usage.

We have been working with this solution for nearly four years.

We have found this to be a stable solution during our time using it.

This solution is scalable, but not easily.

The initial setup of the solution is straightforward as long as all of the requirements have been decided up and detailed beforehand.

We would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The support of the whole infrastructure is one of the main features that makes ServiceNow CMDB suitable for every type of company. It integrates with all other modules like change, business management, HR, and customer service management.

Whenever there is an issue on statuses, you can quickly resolve it.

The initial setup can be very bad if the roadmap is not set up properly. You need a specialist to help you set up the roadmap.

I've been using it for almost 8 years.

Most of the customers have the cloud solution.

It's a very stable solution.

It's very scalable. You can start from a very small size and grow. You can configure, customize, etc.

ServiceNow moves very fast to fix any problems. I would rate their technical support at ten out of ten.

Positive

CMDB is like a journey that requires a specialist's help to build your roadmap. If you get the right resource to build your roadmap, then it's very easy to launch, depending on the process of the company. If it's not properly set up, then it can be very bad.

ServiceNow CMDB is an excellent solution, and I would rate it at ten on a scale from one to ten.

My company is a reseller, we're not the end-user. We don't have ServiceNow ourselves. We develop and we're a service provider, so we only provide ServiceNow solutions.

All areas of the solution have room for improvement. I mean, it's a never-ending thing, everything's being improved all the time. Because I'm an SME, the most important thing is the technical help that I can get, so better, more useful technical support would be good.

I also think the solution would be better if it was more intuitive.

I've only been using the solution for about six months, but the company that I work for has probably been using it for five to ten years.

The stability is about the same as other platforms. It's not better or worse than other products. It's not perfect, but it's pretty good.

The scalability of the solution is good.

It's a complex task, but the ServiceNow version is probably not any more difficult than any other platform.

You pay for the service and whatever extra features you want. If you want minimal service and don't want the extra features, you don't pay for them.

My advice for people looking into the solution would be to have a big bank account.

I rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

CMDB is used for capturing all the IT hardware assets and configuration items. That includes computers, servers, virtual machines, phone devices, switches, et cetera. It's for the network and the front and back end.

There is a data mixer that's called Management and Commission and Discovery. What it does is it helps us auto-populate the information directly by pinging that particular CI and capturing that information. That's a very good feature. It makes it so that we don't have to go for manual updates every time.

There is a lot of documentation online regarding CMDB.

The solution is stable. 

The solution can scale to a certain extent. 

Right now, it's a one-sided integration, which means that whatever information is available in SLCN, for example, the mixer will capture the information. Therefore, there are scenarios where some of the CIs get retired. It does not really update their status. For example, We have 10 servers. Two were retired, so they were not updating anything. For the rest of the eight, they updated information. However, for the two which were retired, there needs to be a modern option for modifying the state as well in mid-server. 

The need to work on how the Virtual Machine Centers are being discovered, and how the Cloud's CI is being discovered and flagged.

The initial setup is a bit complex. 

The scalability capability could be improved. 

The pricing could be more competitive. 

The stability is good. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The solution is scalable, however, there is some room for improvement regarding the vCenter and the Virtual Machine Center, for which we are actually struggling right now.

In our organization, CMDB is used by everyone.

The initial implementation is a bit complex compared to other modules as it's really technical in the back end. The steps are clearly defined on how to do it and there's a use case library available. That said, it's a bit of a tedious process.

You do have to pay for a license, however, I cannot speak to the exact details. It's not part of my responsibilities. My understanding, however, is that pricing could always be better. 

I would advise that before a company starts implementing CMDB, they should look at the CSBM. They should understand CSBM as it is common, however, they need to understand the requirements, and how the structure should be set up before implementing anything. The reason being, there are scenarios where people put all the data into the system, and that causes a blockage, which means that you don't have to actually document every CI. A company should see what should be the scope of the CMDB, and only then start implementing it. Otherwise, it will be a lot of information available that serves no use. 

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

We are just capturing all the services in CMDB, however, we can use that as a part of the change, incident, or problem management. We are just keeping configuration items like hardware and cloud resources like AWS and other infrastructure as on-prem cloud infrastructure. 

The way the CSDM model we have implemented works is great. They provide good structure and offer excellent services right out of the box, without the need to configure it. 

Our committed CMDB is now growing. Earlier we had only the probes and sensors.

The product is growing a lot and adding in lots of great features. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. 

The reliability is excellent. 

The scalability has been excellent in the past.

Technical support has been quite helpful. 

The different tables are available in ServiceNow CMDB are quite good. We don't need to create many custom tables.

ServiceNow is providing the frame only. Whatever you want, you can put it into the frame.

There is some customization we need from the customer side. 

In some cases, we are having issues. 

I can say one experience I had on the VMware side when we are using the change management we had to select from the VMware CI in the change management configuration items. A while back, we were having some issues with modifications and we tried to reach out to support and ServiceNow. They have some limitations on helping us. Apart from that, everything was allowed in terms of us modifying based on the requirements from the customers.

I've been working with the solution for the last five years.

The solution is very stable and completely reliable. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

We've scaled in the past. I can remember when I was working with a British Telecom - one of the largest in the UK - and, at that point in time, we had to implement a lot of scripts. We added based on the requirements from the customer. It's the scalability is there and we can modify many things based on our needs.

In terms of users, for CMDB we have six resources including one delivery manager, one architect, two developers, and one admin.

We are always continuing to expand the solution.

The solution's technical support is excellent. We can create a ticket and, in a matter of hours, especially if it is a high priority, we will get some sort of response within hours. We're quite satisfied with the level of support. They are extremely responsive. 

We have one customized database on BMC Remedy. I went for only one year with the BMC Remedy Configuration Management Database, then I just switched to ServiceNow.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was not overly complex. A company shouldn't have any issues with the process.

The solution does require maintenance. This is due to the fact that, on daily basis, CMDB is populating with some automated processes like Discovery and Service Mapping. Sometimes some issues come up and some matters are thrown due to some dependency on credentials or access for admission. On that basis, as a part of the team, we need to take care on weekly basis by looking at the list of retractors or the history.

We as solution consultants and architects are already maintaining it. We go through all the processes and we build some reports and the reports are taken care of by the admins on a weekly basis. The headache of the reports or the issues is completely on the admin side. If some issues come up, then the admin takes care of them.

I've never studied the ROI as I'm not at that level of knowledge with the company to get those kinds of details. 

We pay for licensing on a yearly basis. We find the pricing to be reasonable. If you need certain customizations, you may need to pay extra for that.

I did not evaluate other options. 

I'm just a customer.

I'm using the 2.0 version now. It's my understanding that they have a 3.0 version out as well. 

I'd recommend the resolution to other organizations. I already have in the past. 

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

I am with a consulting company that implements the tool. I am working to implement ServiceNow in different areas such as SACM and software asset management. CMDB is the underlying database, and I populate it with the data from the clients based on their input and needs.

It has helped in tracking hardware and software and reducing overall costs.

When running large queries within the system, it does have a tendency to bog down the system. This is something that should be improved. I would also like to see the HAM Pro module beefed up a little bit and integrated better into the SAM Pro module, which seems to be pretty much on the roadmap.

Its pricing is pretty complicated and always fluctuating. Its pricing should be improved.

I've been using this tool for about seven years.

It is stable.

We do customizations for clients all the time.

For the most part, I would probably give them a nine out of ten. They are quite responsive.

Its initial process was very complex because there were a lot of customizations. The deployment took about six months.

In terms of the implementation strategy, we followed the standard waterfall methodology. Basically, we stood it up, did all our work and development, and pushed it to production.

It is always fluctuating. It seems to change every six months. Every time they come out with a new iteration, it changes. It is pretty complicated, and they should improve it.

I would absolutely recommend this solution to others. I would advise making sure that they know what they want. The biggest problem that we run into is the client not having a direction in which they want to go, or they don't have a use case to start with.

I would rate ServiceNow CMDB a nine out of ten.