ServiceNow CMDB Reviews

We do a lot of stuff around Mapping. We do Discovery. We do Identification/Reconciliation rules. We do the Transforms and stuff like that. Then, we validate the CMDB Health dashboard and stuff like that. That's predominantly the main work that we do around the CMDB and the data ingestion kind of stuff.

I work for a client and we find CMDB pretty useful as it's being leveraged across the board for all other service management practices. When I say service management practices, I refer to the incident, problem, change management, et cetera. The content in CMDB is pretty useful for us as that's the basis on which many, many decisions can be made. We go right down to the extent of leveraging the application portfolio. We leverage stuff like this to go back to creating files and figuring out which business service is impacted as a result of which CI. That is at its most basic level. We leverage the Discovery to ensure maximum availability and CIs are discovered, preventing manual ingestion. Our Identification/Reconciliation rules help us in affecting and understanding duplicates, and correctly remediating them, and making sure that we are on the right track. The out-of-the-box rules set by ServiceNow are great. The better we blend into it, the better it is for us.

Service Mapping is very useful. We found the APM, which is also part of the configuration, to be helpful. The APM has been pretty phenomenal. 

Portfolio management is very useful for us. The Discovery aspect is great. 

The performance analytics and the health dashboard are amazing to work with. 

The CI Class Manager and its stuff around it; the IRE rules, the Integration/Reconciliation, the classes which are in there in the CI Class Manager are all pretty useful as well.

The data presidencies are pretty useful to me. The Reconciliation Engine appends to it. 

The CMDB Health results, which have been configured by ServiceNow are used out-of-the-box are great. It's pretty useful to us.

We also use a lot of service associations, which help us to do the top-down mapping and understanding of end-to-end aspects if you want to have a chronological view. 

Most importantly, I think I can see the CMDB of ServiceNow aligns very closely and very well with the CSDM model. 

There are costly changes here and there. For example, it becomes difficult for us to identify the volume of patents. What we do is we fundamentally de-market and compare against the best and to another product that we were using before, which had some features that we didn't. For example, we use BMC Discovery. BMC Discovery has heaps of patents written using the TPL. BMC Discovery is a primitive tool and it's been in the market for a while. You would expect a lot more packages to be there. In ServiceNow, we are not there yet. It's less mature. 

There should be a few more classes here and there. For example, there are people who keep talking about Apple devices. They need to be taken into account, and they are not. Sometimes, we have certain rules and regulations of CIs and how we can pick up only those CIs which are operational to a change and describe non-operational ones. When you work with load balancers, when they're off, they obviously go into a non-operational mode.

We, from a process side, need to understand certain areas where we need to blend in. I would think that, for example, Network Gear would be a separate class under the config item parent. However, now, it's come under the hardware. That makes sense. 

I see the table called serial number that should be a lot more efficient and maybe that's the way we have configured it. That's where we are doing a shabby job - our duplication rules were on the serial number and the serial number table. The serial number table itself is a volatile table that keeps fluctuating from time to time. Things like that have to be eventually delivered. They keep coming, they keep coming. 

I don't think there are any pain points. It's just that we love to understand from a process perspective where we need to rectify ourselves. The tool is made a little differently and we need to figure it out. Our process cannot be stubborn and say the tool has to blend with the process. As an organization, we are very strong in our process. We expect the tool to cater to us whenever we tweak things and mess them up. However, when you tweak something, you need to be able to go in and clean it up and not think it will sort itself out. You need to put a patch. However, if you put a patch on a patch on a patch you've entirely screwed up the tool.

The tool has given you the provision to do the customization, however, you need to be strategic about what you do. You need to be careful in terms of writing. When you say SCCM is a secondary source of truth, for example, you need to be sure what activities you want from there. If you have multiple tools that are going to ingest data into the CMDB, you need to be careful of what rules we write to ensure that they fall in place. 

We've been using the solution until recently. We used the solution in the last 18 or so months.

The solution is very stable. ServiceNow is the way forward for many of us. I would just work on BMC Remedy as well, however, I've not been impressed as much as I'm impressed with ServiceNow. ServiceNow is definitely a lot more advanced. It's a lot more flexible and it's quite easy to use unlike BMC's product, which is pretty sophisticated. The Discovery is a little more complicated. If you want to understand how mapping is, it's all confusing in some places. They even recommend the SAAM and the CAM mapping. Whereas in ServiceNow, it's pretty straightforward. The complexities are not there. 

The scalability is phenomenal. It's expandable, for sure. It's quite easy to do so as well. I've seen its integration with a lot of tools. We integrated it with analytical tools like Qlik Sense for various reasons. They are also integrated with tools like SCCM. We integrate pretty smartly and pretty extensively. It's scalable due to the fact that we can take and look at other modules which are the add-ons from ServiceNow itself, such as performance analytics, asset management, and whatnot. 

We have all kinds of users, from the bottom to the top, from the business owner to the business managers. We have business users. We have the technology users. Then, we have the IT users themselves. Across the organization, we definitely can say we have around 25,000 users. At any point in time, concurrent usage could be up to 10,000, for sure. 

ServiceNow is our single source of truth. That's the single service management tool that we're using right across the board. It is definitely being used extensively. We have plans in terms of extending the usage. The expansion may not be until we plan to acquire a new organization or something. Otherwise, now, it's pretty good.

It took us about six months to set everything up, however, that's the organization. They're looking at a truckload of CIs in the CMDB. They're looking at about seven to eight million CIs, and therefore it was not going to be that straightforward and easy. It took us about three to six months due to the sheer volume. On top of that, we had our own organizational change that kept happening parallelly. People kept moving. People kept coming in. However, with something like this, it's all expected. It's part of the exercise.

There was complexity involved in the implementation, however, I can't blame it on the tool. Our thinking wasn't right. We didn't have the architects with the right frame of mind to put things together. The tool was in place. It's that we needed to know how to use it that held us back a bit. We needed to go and ask ourselves: "How do we use Discovery? How do we leverage on Mapping? How do we do things parallelly? What about other data? What about archive data? What are you going to keep? What are you going to flush out?" All those things, we needed to put in place. 

We had about 15 to 20 people on the implementation process for six months. We have to do some structural changes in the organization as well. At the same time, we weren't blending it into HR. We were blending into an HR framework, so we were restructuring the organization in a one-sided way. That's possibly one of the reasons why it took a little bit more time to get the whole thing fixed.

During implementation we did the configuration. Parallelly, we started the incident, problem, and change management. It was a full-fledged implementation across the entire organization and it was done together. It wasn't like incident first and then change second, and problem third or something. We did all of them together.

The solution does require maintenance from time to time. I'm not involved personally in that. I use only one part of that whole thing. There are people who do the maintenance for the entire solution. There's actually a team that's full-fledged and on maintenance. 

I really do not know much about the pricing and licensing package. I'm not on top of that. It's no a part of the solution I directly deal with.

We are partners with ServiceNow.

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

I'd advise other companies that, when you start using the tool, first, of course, you should have an architectural understanding of your organization. You need to have an understanding of what is it that you want to achieve, and an understanding of the end-to-end setup from the business to the end infrastructure layer. You want to know what you want and what you don't want, and have that well-built, and have an architectural view, and understand where your data comes in and how it comes in. CMDB can't help with that part. 

Don't go and expect the CMDB to do all the magic for you. You need architectural brains to blend in with the tool and that's how this whole thing works. CMDB blends very nicely if you have the architectural brain and if you have a logical understanding of what you want. Don't expect the tool to do it for you by throwing in junk and saying, "Yeah, do it for me."

If you have this, you have a good process in the works already. You will be able to blend in with asset management. Config and asset work hand in glove as a second function. When you know how these two blend with each other, you know what the architectural view is, and if you have the right people and the right sense, the tool will help. If your base is weak, I don't think the other process will work at all. 

If you really want to go down to the topmost to the bottom-most level, there are a lot of people on the business side who swill say, "I don't understand my application landscape. I don't understand this. I don't know why do we have so many products. Why do we have this? Why do we have that?" People don't understand. However, if you have a CMDB in place that actually manifests what the entire application landscape is, it's on top to bottom very comfortably. If you don't have CMDB, you'll regret it. I have seen many times it just cost the organization real money not having it in place. There has been financial loss, revenue loss, et cetera. 

I've realized that if you have a good full-fledged CMDB, being involved in understanding what causes problems is not very difficult. You don't have to go searching. You can look at the devices. You can go pinpoint. We can narrow the search. What it means is we can enable faster resolutions. Obviously, you can have better and higher availability.

That's the impact of a good quality CMDB. Traceability is good. You're able to pinpoint to the bottom-most of the problem. You know where to go. With CMDB you no longer say "I don't understand my IT landscape. I don't understand why we have so many applications. I don't know what we're doing." In a split second, you can actually go and say, "You know what? There's a network problem, and I know that the glitches. Please go look at it." You can go right down to that level very quickly.

That's the advantage of having good quality CMDB. Good quality CMDB equals good quality data, which equals the ability to diagnose and sort out issues. 

We are using it as the foundation of the ServiceNow platform. It allows you to mature other processes such as ITSM, ISAM, and security operations. It is a SaaS solution.

It has allowed us to reduce the number of outages and the duration of outages.

It is a dependable source of data. If I want to understand what technologies are used to deliver certain business outcomes, this is what I would use. I can know that this particular server is being used to deliver this business application or business service.

There are some gaps in the technologies that can be solved. Operational technology isn't quite 100% there yet, but I hear it is on the roadmap.

I would also like it to be cheaper.

I have been using this solution for five years.

From a technical perspective, we've had no issues. A lot of it comes down to just making sure that the processes are being followed properly, which is a process people's problem rather than a tool problem.

Being a SaaS-based product, it scales with demand. We've had no issues on that front.

It covers a lot because we do employee self-service. We probably have over 300 users. They can be anything across IT because anybody who is interacting with the service desk is going to go through this solution, so everybody in the company has access to it.

In terms of increasing its overall usage, we identify any chances to bring it on board. We use it, and we have also got customers for our CRM to leverage it. We've basically got a philosophy of looking to identify whether they can be on the ServiceNow platform before moving in a different direction.

We contacted them occasionally when we come across some form of bug or something. They've been quite responsive to the issues that we've had and helped us in moving forward.

I'm not certain about this organization because it was here when I came on board. At previous ones, they had HP or BMC that were replaced by ServiceNow.

Essentially, it was about collecting the right data to store in the database. So, it involved understanding what it is that we cared about, identifying our use cases, and driving the automation to be able to collect that data and store it in the right place. I worked with the security teams to get the access that we needed at various endpoints to be able to allow the tool to function. To get it fully up and running and operational took about ten weeks.

We used professional services to get it off the grounds, and then from there, roles were defined for the responsibility to be applied. It was a part of their job to ensure that it is performing as it should.

It requires participation from the network team and the security team to allow the tool to function. After that, somebody is required to adopt the role of a configuration manager or process owner. 

In terms of the number of people, five or six people were involved, but some of them were only for a handful of hours or for escalations. The security administrator and the network administrator were required quite a bit upfront, and then from there, they weren't involved as much.

It has provided the ROI. The consistency of processes has given dividends. Previously, you couldn't scale by just relying on emails and conversations to understand what tasks were being done. It gives us the transparency of everything that is being worked on. We have the whole audit trail as well as all tasks that are being accomplished.

I would like it to be cheaper. If you've got a large environment, it can get quite expensive quite quickly. You still get a return on investment, but everybody has a tight budget.

In terms of licensing, everything is pretty much known upfront. Being SaaS-based, there are no real additional gotchas that we came across.

I would advise others to try to remain as out of the box as possible. It is built for the solution that you're going after. I see a lot of people who try to make it look like their previous tool, and they were leaving that previous tool for a key reason.

I would rate ServiceNow CMDB a nine out of ten. There is always a little bit of room for improvements, but so far, it is much greater than what we had previously.

We use CMDB as a core solution for storing objects. You can still use your server information, your network information, all the characteristics of an infrastructure object, and use CMDB. We use it to provide reporting, change in management, and so forth.

The centralization in general is great. You get one version of the truth when you have a CMDB because it's all centralized.

You need to perform additional planning because their recommendation is not to add columns to the core tables. Their recommendation is always to add related lists, which is the best route to go. From an improvement standpoint, I like it because it can even maintain your upgrade pattern, but in some cases that may not be applicable. From a processing standpoint, a development standpoint, their processes of building the related lists is okay. It can be done right now; you just have to kind of think forward and you should make sure that people do it that way.

Every interface goes through updates and modifications. So right now, ServiceNow overall, in regards to having multiple screens open at the same time, you can do it, but if you try to go back, it loses its reference point as it uses a browser-based model as opposed to a tab-based model — it's window-based in other words.

I have been using this solution for roughly three years.

Where we are right now, it's pretty stable. I mean, every system has its issues, but for the most part, we've had good success with it.

It works fine. Integrations have been pretty straightforward. There is a high level of functionality when integrating with third-party systems.

The tech support has been fine — I've only had to reach out to them a couple of times. We kind of have a round table and communicate with one another when we run into a real bug, but it's on rare occasions that we have to contact them. 

It's somewhat straightforward — If you've gone through it enough times. It just depends on your infrastructure and how you have it setup. 

In regards to deploying it, there's always planning involved — sizing up your systems is always a key factor. If you know your organization, you should have some reference of how much space you're going to need. Then, if you have your growth plan laid out, you should know, "Hey, I need this much space." 

It's a good tool when it comes to RTSM, I think it has a lot of great functionality — planning. The biggest thing is communicating with the user base. It may sound a little cliche, but you're going to hear people complaining, "It's not like what we're used to." Well, we wouldn't be switching if the old situation worked. You need to get everybody on board and say, "Hey, you complain about this, this tool has that." You need to get them involved early. The sooner, the better, as far as testing, and training. Whoever signs the check is fine, but they're not the ones who are actually going to use the system. You should buy into the user community right away or near the beginning.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

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. 

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. 

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.

We use the product to maintain the hardware inventory.

ServiceNow CMDB helps us maintain hardware. We do not have to proceed manually.

The product's most valuable feature is its ability to extract the details of organizational hardware and provide the latest setup updates.

The platform's stability needs improvement. They could add a dashboard feature as well.

We have been using ServiceNow CMDB for three years.

I rate the platform's stability a seven out of ten. It needs improvement.

We have 20 ServiceNow CMDB in our organization. It has good scalability, and we plan to increase the usage.

The initial setup has medium complexity. It can be deployed on the cloud and takes a week to complete.

We implement the product in-house.

I rate ServiceNow CMDB an eight out of ten. I recommend it to other users. I advise others to understand how the product works, different prerequisites for setup, existing network, and rules that need to be activated.