ServiceNow CMDB Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.