ServiceNow CMDB Reviews

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. 

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.

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.