ServiceNow Reviews

We use the product as an incident management tool and receive alerts via email. 

In my experience, ServiceNow's most valuable feature is its flexibility. If you have a DevOps or development team, you can customize it to meet your specific needs. The tool's dashboard categorizes incidents, making managing it much easier.

The installation and deployment of ServiceNow can be a bit challenging. One major issue I've encountered is that ServiceNow doesn't provide the same mobile responsiveness or features that we used to enjoy with other tools. For example, with Splunk, our response times were about five minutes, and we could manage alerts and incidents directly from our mobile devices.

Our development team has been trying to implement similar functionalities in ServiceNow for the past three to four months, but so far, these features have not been successfully integrated. Splunk even provides a wireless call feature from the mobile. 

I have been using the product for three years. 

The tool is scalable. My company has 80 users. 

We haven't contacted the technical support team yet. 

The solution is expensive. 

If you're starting with ServiceNow, you don't need to worry too much about documentation or complex setups at the beginner level; it's not overly difficult. I'd advise you to start exploring it. Focus on customizing your homepage to suit your needs using ServiceNow's filters. For instance, if your homepage currently displays twenty fields, you can adjust the filters to show only the five to ten fields most important to you.

I rate it a nine out of ten. 

When we need to request a task from another team at my client's organization, we typically submit a request in ServiceNow. We provide all the necessary details through the ServiceNow platform, and any communication related to the request is documented in the form of comments. This approach ensures transparency by recording what was requested, actions taken by the assigned person, and the time taken to resolve the request. Using ServiceNow, we can easily track the progress of tasks, review the history of actions, and assess the workload of a specific individual over a given period, be it a week or a month.

It proves invaluable in tracking significant incidents within your work environment. It facilitates the monitoring of major incidents and provides insights into the effort expended to resolve each incident. This capability adds substantial value by allowing a comprehensive understanding of the incident resolution process and the associated resource allocation.

It should include information on navigating various user interfaces for creating diverse requests directed to different teams. Enhancing usability involves providing easy access to interfaces tailored for different types of requests across teams.

I have been working with it for two years.

It is proven to be reliable; we have not encountered any issues with it.

We have nearly one hundred to one hundred fifty users.

The initial setup is relatively straightforward.

It's effective, indeed. If you aim to monitor the number of issues you're handling and wish to understand the effort required to resolve them, this serves as an excellent ticketing tool. Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.

We use ServiceNow for help desks.

ServiceNow is one of the few easiest platforms you can integrate with products like Ansible to automate your workflows.

The solution’s user interface could be improved and given a better design.

I have been using ServiceNow for more than three years.

ServiceNow is a stable solution, and I haven't experienced any downtime with it.

I rate ServiceNow ten out of ten for stability.

Around 500 to 800 users from the IT team and some of the business teams in our organization use ServiceNow.

Overall, I rate ServiceNow an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for ITSM and a little bit of ITOM. However, we don't use it for ITBM.

Role-based access is a 'positive'.

ServiceNow has a feature called Orchestration. In that, you can utilize the tool to communicate with applications and systems to issue commands and perform actions. That's a positive, it's something that does exist in the tool. We are in our infancy in utilizing that.

There's a relatively new feature called performance analytics. It's supposed to provide a lot more information. It's got machine learning and some AI built into it. We're our infancy with that. 

For the nuts and bolts running of an IT organization, I can't really say there's anything lacking, feature-wise.

The solution is relatively easy to use.

One thing I don't care for is the reporting and the way it functions. Exporting a report, from a view,  initiates a rerun of the query in the background - highly inefficient.

In terms of the implementation, there seems to be a dearth of basic table joins, on initial install, necessitating the creation of your own database views to get seemingly related data to act like related data. In other words, it's popular to have incidents linked to changes, and linked to problems, and linked to other types of records. And vice versa, you could have an incidents caused by a change. You could have an incident that has a problem record built off of it. However, there are several modules where, if you don't create table joins - for example, for demand records and demand tasks - between those two, then the only option is pull two reports (one for Demands, one for Demand Tasks), and manually merge them outside of the tool. It's highly inefficient. That is something that is a deficiency within the tool design overall.

The initial setup is a bit complex (could have been designed to be profile-driven, as an alternative).

While I recognize that it's a popular thing to do, due to poor design, update sets have to be moved manually, from platform to platform, easily introducing errors (sequence, origin, etc.)  along the way. I've seen far better promote-to-production schemes with other tools.

I've been using ServiceNow for more than 5 years.

Scales 'up' well.  

Scales 'down' poorly.

The solution is not exactly scalable for a mom-and-pop shop (and SMBs). The costs would be too prohibitive for that.

Someone once said, a bird, no matter the size, has the same number of bones. If you're going to do incident change problem, asset config, things like that, for a mom-and-pop, technically, you have the same number of types of things you need to be concerned about. It's just the volume of how it's being applied. A mom-and-pop store might carry 50 items in its inventory. A large company is going to have thousands upon thousands. Therefore, ServiceNow would not be a good solution for a small organization with few assets. 

If you don't have a full CMDB to begin with it really makes a lot of things awkward within the tool. 

We have 4,000+ 

ServiceNow Technical support needs improvement.

One example - 

Order - (context - business rules) - ServiceNow allows you to have any number of rules with the same order number. 

ServiceNow's official answer to 'how does the database code decide which rule to execute first, when multiple business rules are assigned the same order level?': we have no answer 

(it goes without saying - use unique order levels)

We're just a customer and an end-user.

We started on-prem and then switched to cloud. We switched to the cloud about three years ago.

- fill out the CMDB before you start implementing the tool - make the time.

- plan out table joins as you implement new modules.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. I would just warn others that it's too easy to incorporate abysmally poor design.

We use this solution for incident management, change request management, and service request catalog. These are our three primary use cases.

Within our organization, there are roughly 15,000 to 20,000 employees using this solution. We have two staff members that handle all maintenance-related issues. 

As our mission over the next couple of years is acquisition, we definitely plan to increase our usage of this solution. 

We aligned several different service desks onto one platform. There is a cost savings in not maintaining multiple systems. 

I find the incident management part to be the most valuable. That's how the service desk tracks tickets.

They could be more competitive with their licensing. We went to roll out asset management discovery and at the time they charge per network device only and you didn't get a price break until you were at 5k devices. To me, I would change the licensing to discovery of all devices. We made do with SCCM instead, but the limitation with using that is that we can only discovery over one domain. 

CreatorCon is an event for Servicenow customers to show off what they've done with the tool. Servicenow benefits because they can partner with the customer to make a solution a permanent solution in the tool. 

I have been using ServiceNow for 11 years. 

In the 11 years that we've been using it, it's not gone down more than once; and we started with just one help desk on it — we now have five.

If you get the right person, the technical support is pretty good. 

We used to use E-Service — it was horrible. 

Deployment took four weeks. 

A vendor helped us with the implementation. That made things pretty easy. 

Our licensing is on a yearly basis. We normally end up doing a true-up payment because we tend to acquire more people and use more licenses.

Yes, Remedy (Salesforce), SysAid, Cherwell, TopDesk. Cherwell came in a close second. 

My advice is to use a third-party vendor to help with the installation. Keep in mind, some are good, some aren't. You would have to send your staff away for training for about six months before they could even attempt to implement this solution. 

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give ServiceNow a rating of nine. There's always room for improvement, but it's the Cadillac of ticketing systems.

Everything that I've done over the last six years with ServiceNow has been for hospital systems. It was used at different levels for different clients. Many times, it was being used by the whole organization, but my involvement has always been for the department projects. There was significant effort into reporting and dashboards and some automation for approvals. I am currently using its latest version.

Visibility and resource management are the two areas that are improved by the ServiceNow Project Management implementation. The Project Management module provides visibility to leadership. We are able to get accurate dashboards and, more importantly, proper resource management. A lot of this isn't necessarily ServiceNow functionality. It is also a matter of implementation and adoption process.

Before ServiceNow, in the environments I've been worked with, there were a bunch of files, such as Microsoft Project plans or Excel spreadsheets, all over the place, and very rarely anybody had a clear understanding of where we were in the project. By the time they had an understanding, the document used to become dated. 

Being able to have the required information for project management is valuable. I've got multiple people accessing it, and I'm tracking tasks with percentages done. It allows me to have detailed notes and provides the ability to attach documents. I have used a lot of project management solutions, and there were gaps in terms of what was available. ServiceNow has got all the features and functionalities.

It is a solid solution. It is also easy to get into and use. It is certainly highly scalable. 

The reporting, which also includes dashboards, needs to be improved. Both dashboards and reporting require subject matter experts. A lot of end-user configuration and functionality comes with ServiceNow and it is not bad, but when I want to do something slightly more sophisticated, I've got to get a ServiceNow subject matter expert to get those dashboards all set up. One of the big reasons why that's so difficult is that ServiceNow is effectively a whole bunch of databases, and almost every module is fundamentally a database, so pulling information from multiple modules is painful. The key thing here is the Time Tracking piece, which is rather important because that's what helps you automate the percentage done inline. Getting a report that shows combined information from Time Tracking and Project Management into a single view is difficult.

There should be the ability to turn on and off portions of Project Management. I'm not asking them to do a finance portion of Project Management through the interface. Currently, there are hundreds of fields that project managers are looking at and trying to decide whether they should fill them out or not. Being able to configure the user interface without a subject matter expert would be really great. 

When you want to get a little more value out of the product and pull data from multiple modules and do something that isn't built-in and is a user-configurable thing, it gets ugly. Currently, as soon as you install the new version, you've got to go back there and make all those tweaks. There should be just a configuration file that goes to the new version. When a new release comes out and I've tweaked it, I shouldn't have to go back and manually tweak everything again. 

When we look at ITSM pieces, there is a knowledge base that works really well. I feel that the Project Management module does not leverage the knowledge base the way it should. I don't think it needs to be a separate knowledge base. There should be links. Currently, if I am configuring a project and looking at a particular tab or field, and I want to know more details about that, there is no simple way other than to go into the knowledge base and do a search. There is no simple way for me to just click and see the approved knowledge base article about that particular tab or field. 

There is no built-in ability to get to these articles, and the customer would have to build it. All the stuff is in the knowledge base, but I am constantly required to go and do a search and find it. After that, I have to try and figure out if this is the approved one. Most knowledge bases are designed so that your end users can submit articles, at least successful ones. You've got to get the subject matter expertise into the knowledge articles, and there is a clear delineation between the ones that are approved versus the ones that work right. I want both types of articles in there, but I want to be able to delineate which ones are the approved ones and tie them in Project Management. This functionality is already there in some other areas, but it is not there in Project Management. Not being able to link that knowledge base in a more fluid way is a big miss because it just makes adoption much harder.

Resource management should be easier. This is an area where I would love to see an improvement. The nature of ServiceNow is that it tends to be a bunch of fields. It is a bit like an Excel spreadsheet. You're in a software interface, but you've got a bunch of rows and columns. Other than dashboards, there are a lot of rows and columns views that often do not help you to easily see and manage resources. More graphical and more click-and-drag ability around resource management would be really good. The data is in there, and you can run dashboards, reports, and stuff like that, and very often, get the information in a somewhat consumable view. However, it tends to have frozen columns. It would be amazing if they can make resource management a little bit more graphical. There are other solutions that I've seen where resource management was a more visual experience.

I have been using this solution for six years.

From a perspective of it working, there are bugs occasionally, but for the most part, it is very solid. There are always pockets of problems, but when it comes to Project Management, I am yet to see a significant bug or issue. Most of the bugs and issues are more related to a lack of functionality as opposed to something that is broken or bad data. All such functionalities get added in the next version. 

From the perspective of doing what it is supposed to do, it is very solid. My experience has been very good, especially with the most recent release.

It is highly scalable. Once you get over the initial pricing shock, you can have multiple people in there, and you can scale quickly and easily. It is one of those things where you get a better price for more people and most subscription licenses. Technically, it can scale up, but it starts getting expensive.

In the current environment, they have licenses for 180 people who are actively using the Project Management module. They have 30,000 end users, and their users have view-only access to Project Management. Once it is stable, and they are completely comfortable with it, which may be a year or longer, they might potentially expand it to the entire environment. They have 30,000 people in the US, and they also have health systems in South America. So, the total number of users could be between 50,000 to 60,000. Going to South America would probably be two to three years out.

I've got a lot of experience with ServiceNow outside of the Project Management module. Focusing just on the Project Management module, my experiences have been very good. ServiceNow, at least for this particular module, has been smart and only tends to let you get on the phone with somebody who really knows the product. There are not that many support calls typically, and they tend to be just the technical staff that are supporting the module. While you can have end-user support, I've not worked with many customers who buy the support for the Project Management module for anybody who is not actively using it as a project manager, and even those project managers usually rely on the core administrator team. They'll tell them what the problem is, and that core team will call support.

When I've been on the calls with support, which I have done on a regular basis over the last couple of years and certainly with this current customer, I've been very pleased with their knowledge. These are highly technical calls, and it is not what I would call typical support. It is definitely the third-tier support that we are calling and getting, and my experience has been extremely good for the Project Management module.

I've definitely used over 20 project management solutions, but they can't be compared with ServiceNow. Some of them were homegrown, and some of them were built into the electronic medical record solution that was there. 

The current customer I'm working for didn't make a switch. They had made that decision and gone to ServiceNow four years ago. They adopted Project Management probably two years ago. It seemed very logical to go ahead and switch over to ServiceNow Project Management because people were already logging into ServiceNow. About a year ago, in fact, right about the time when COVID hit us, they actually finished the implementation. There have been some hits and misses because the staff resigned and things like that. 

Other customers that I've worked for had either Microsoft Project files or Excel spreadsheets. Many times, they also had a web-based project management solution that literally was a task list with a percent complete and literally four fields per task, and those would be stacked in. A lot of these were more team management solutions such as Microsoft Office 365. None of them is a competitor to what you get from ServiceNow.

It is overly complex mainly because it has a lot of content. There are some out-of-the-box configurations, and there is also a lot of content that is not configurable out of the box. Of course, most organizations aren't mature enough to use the additional content and additional tabs. Typically, the implementers are smart enough to deal with that, but I've worked with customers that weren't smart enough to go ahead and say, "Hey, we need a subject matter expert to come in and install this module." Sometimes, they brought somebody in to do just the bare bone install, and then they wanted to configure it themselves. 

You need a subject matter expert. ServiceNow doesn't always do it, and very often, it is third parties who implement it, but they don't do a great job of educating their customer on what they should and shouldn't do as their initial install. They just say here is the tool to some extent. You should ideally go for subject matter experts that are either recommended by ServiceNow or are directly from ServiceNow. Of course, it gets more expensive as you go up that chain.

ServiceNow could do a better job of prepping their coordinators and supporting this process. It is tough because most of the customers first need training on project management in general before you start teaching them how to use the tool. There is no lack of support. It is just not well-organized and prioritized support. There is a knowledge article for everything from ServiceNow, and all the information is there, but it is not organized in a way, especially for a new user, to say that don't worry about this. We'll get to this later. Here are the things you should worry about, and here are the things that you really should do as best practice. That's the key.

I have been advising and working with implementation teams over the last three years. Every single time, after they implemented and started using it, they started to discover things that they wish they'd known beforehand. That's why it would be good to have an organized set of best practices from ServiceNow saying, "Hey, you're implementing. This is new. You don't have a mature organization that has a bunch of requirements. So, here are the minimum out-of-the-box things that you should enable. We're also going to hide all that stuff that you don't need, and we're going to get these fundamentals working." Guided and organized best practices for organizations that are new to project management would be a huge win for ServiceNow.

It is a cloud product, so it requires just configuration from us. Typically, implementation takes two to three months, which includes all the beforehand and after closeout. You have some meetings, make some agreements, install the product, and get it up and running. Installation would take just two to three weeks, and the implementation would take two to three months because you've got to do training and everything else to truly get it in there. Most organizations also end up having to come back and do remediation that takes an additional three to six months. We're not talking about the setup where everybody is working on it. We're talking about a setup where you've got a small team that is typically working on the issues, coming up with solutions, and then implementing them later. There is usually a three-month to six-month clean-up afterward. It's not uncommon for me to see close to a full year from the first conversation to when they feel like they've got stable, usable, and good reporting coming out of the solution.

It was a company recommended by ServiceNow. ServiceNow has got a top-six list, and this was number two on their list. In terms of knowledge and the ability to solve problems, they were very good. Because there are no organized best practices and things like that from ServiceNow to help customers in avoiding mistakes, I've not seen an implementor that does it properly. I am constantly trying to help, but, of course, you also typically have that executive that just wants to get it slammed in. This is because they think that with the tools in place, things will suddenly get better. However, good technology rarely results in good results. You've got to have adoption in order to have good results.

While I'm certainly complaining about some deficiencies, I have been very pleased with this implementor's ability to come in, implement, explain, tweak, and get things right. I have been very pleased with what they do. Deficiencies are more typical of all of the implementers, including ServiceNow.

In terms of maintenance, I have not worked too closely with the PMO staff that does that, but as I understand it, they've got four people. Two are directly involved, and two are more along the lines of training and support. There are really four roles for them. There is one role of subject matter experts who are constantly looking at what functionality is in use and for which functionality they want to start adopting. They look at what can we do with the Project Management tool. They also create a lot of dashboards and reports. The end-user functionality is very powerful, but when you want a dashboard that starts grabbing things from multiple places, it is not easy. They spend a fair amount of time doing that kind of work. They also provide support and spend a fair amount of time troubleshooting the data, which isn't because the product isn't working correctly. It is because the users aren't correctly using it. They also simply look at the data for management. They kind of audit the data to see that what we know and what we're hearing in the status update meetings matches what's in the tool. When it doesn't match, they audit the content and figure out whether there is a problem. All four of them probably spend at least 30% or 40% of their time doing that audit process, sitting in meetings, hearing what's going on, looking at the status reports, matching those up with what's in the tool, and making sure that it matches.

That's a tough call. I would say yes, but I don't think that many of the customers are calculating or tracking that sort of thing. From my perspective, when we say the return on investment, a lot of times we're talking about hard dollars and being able to readily show that my expenses were reduced. The return on investment for most of the project management solutions is improved performance in project management, and therefore, it is a bit of a soft cost saving because of the improved efficiency and ability to deliver projects. That's usually where ROI is seen, and it is tough to make that a metric.

I'm not aware of any additional costs. I'm pretty sure that the current client is paying just the licensing fee per user. I do know that they've got some support agreement with ServiceNow, but I don't think that is broken out or specific to Project Management. It is just inclusive.

I certainly would recommend it on a regular basis as a viable scalable project management solution. It is a solid solution. It has got all the features and functionalities I want. The lack of visualization of data, ease of implementation, and ease of configuration results in difficulty in training people, and it needs to be more visual and a little bit easier to configure and maintain. Currently, as soon as you install the new version, you've got to go back there and make all those tweaks. It is not all or nothing sort of thing. It is just a case of how much of the functionality done in a manual way has to be redone in each update. That could change over time. They're constantly improving how this works, but in my experience, that was very much the case for the last two upgrades that I've done. Occasionally, I've had problems where existing data from a prior version did not migrate. There is some wonkiness, and you got to go in and clean things up a little bit, but it is pretty minor. It is one of those things where when you've got a solution like ServiceNow that every single person in the organization is using, and you do the update the next morning and realize that none of your reports are right because you've tweaked it, and now, you have to go and fix it. In fairness, if you only use it out of the box the way ServiceNow says you should use Project Management, it probably wouldn't be an issue, but I am yet to see a customer use ServiceNow Project Management out of the box with no changes.

Comparing it to all other project management solutions without consideration of cost, I would rate ServiceNow a seven out of ten.

The solution is being used for our ticketing system.

It is user-friendly and simple to use. 

The solution could be made cheaper. Machine learning and artificial intelligence should be introduced in the next release. 

I have been using ServiceNow for two years. 

The scalability of the solution is good. Presently, ten thousand users are using the solution. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.

The initial setup is easy. The deployment was done within a month. 

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

There are multiple use cases associated with ServiceNow. The major use case is IT service management, incident management, and IT operations management. ServiceNow offers GRC and solutions that integrate with other security systems for cybersecurity. I have been involved in both ITOM and ITSM.

ServiceNow offers a range of ITSM, IT incident management, and PRCPs. The entire platform makes it an excellent product for users. Its capability to manage end-to-end ITSM is necessary because no other competitor is offering such a comprehensive solution.

The utilization of AI in ServiceNow needs enhancement. Their incident management system requires attention. If you examine it closely, there's an extension available in the market for future consideration. ServiceNow is quite advanced in incident management solutions. If ServiceNow aims to improve its incident management capabilities by incorporating AI/ML and other general components, it would advance the product and enhance its use cases, ultimately boosting productivity. This would lead to improved overall value for enterprise customers.

I have been using ServiceNow for eight to ten years.

ServiceNow is a very stable product. I have heard a couple of integration issues in some places.

ServiceNow can be easily scalable. However, scaling down may pose a problem because, if someone has purchased a certain quantity of subscription-based licenses, they cannot be reduced. You have to complete the term of those licenses whether you're scaling down or up.

We cater the solution to enterprise customers.

Our delivery team used to interact with ServiceNow, and they used to receive support from them. They are responsive. Most of the time, issues are resolved. They ensure a smooth delivery process and quick response. In certain complicated situations, such as new integrations where ServiceNow is not supported, there is a lot of email exchanges.

Positive

ServiceNow offers a very comprehensive tool that covers end-to-end IT services and IT operations management. This is where enterprise customers seek an end-to-end solution. ServiceNow is being adopted by numerous customers. I have experience with BMC Solutions.

BMC also provides an IT service management platform called BMC Remedy. Remedy is less comprehensive and user-friendly compared to ServiceNow. I've encountered support and configuration issues with BMC Remedy.

There is a large pool of trained workforce available for ServiceNow. Considering their market share, which exceeds 60%, there are ample skilled resources in the market. ServiceNow technology has been established. I haven't encountered challenges with ServiceNow projects in terms of implementation or configuration wherever I've worked. However, the deployment can vary depending on the company and partner, and how they've structured their practice teams and training resources.

If it's a Greenfield project, then a new deployment is necessary. For enterprise customers, integration becomes the key focus. ServiceNow offers a substantial integration portfolio to address these needs.

Return on investment is good because once the overall comprehensive solution is deployed, it offers a lot of ROI to the end customers. If a customer opts for a point solution to manage their ITSM and adopts different technologies to integrate, it is going to cost them, and then it will add up to their complexity.

The solution is expensive compared to other tools but holds value for money.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.