The 1E Tachyon single agent and platform is a remote endpoint management solution designed to significantly improve IT’s ability to support the Work From Anywhere Enterprise. It provides endpoint diagnostics and remediation, end-user experience management and monitoring, and service delivery for ServiceNow ITSM.
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ServiceNow IT Service Management
Score 8.4 out of 10
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ServiceNow is a fast-growing service management provider that went public in 2012. Built on the ServiceNow Now Platform, the IT Service Management bundle provides an agent workspace with knowledge management, and modules supporting issue tracking and problem resolution, change, release and configuration management, and (on the higher tier ITSM Professional plan) ITAM and software asset management.
When we are needing to patch workstations for zero-day vulnerabilities or security risks, Tachyon Explorer is our go-to tool to push out those settings quickly. We have a Tachyon server stood up in our DMZ to communicate with the workstations outside of our VPN, so we can push those settings or patches to devices without needing them to attach to our network. It's really nice to be able to communicate with the computers that rarely connect to our corporate network and ensure that they are still protected. We do have the 1E Client installed on all of our internal servers in order to get inventory and licensing information, but we don't typically utilize the Tachyon software on the servers for much else. A different team handles those computers and often requires change management, so expedited changes don't happen often there. Standard deployment and patching tools do the job.
In our organization, we are using ServiceNow extensively. Change Management, Incident Management, Problem Management, Time tracking are few modules which we use extensively. This sort of model will work for any product or service based companies as the product is built on ITIL framework. So this product will be suited for small or large scale companies to better organize and add controls and track SLA's for technology or business process.
When I have a number of requests to make, for example a request to add a dozen or so user accounts to more than one group account in Active Directory , I can put all the needed information into the initial form, add it to my "shopping cart" and all of that information remains on the screen for the next item for which I only need to edit a few items (like the AD group name in this example), and keep adding them to the shopping cart until I have them all. When I "Check Out" each of those items is generated as a separate task under the one request. It simplifies and expedites the creation and tracking of these kinds of requests.
I can easily and quickly see what tickets are currently assigned to me in order to prioritize them and remain aware of my workload.
Numerous fields for CIs can be used when trying to find the entry for a particular item. For example, IP Address, server name, raw text, classification, and so on.
To help with making sense out of related tasks, when a task is assigned to me and I need to open another task for a different team to work in order to complete my task, I can open a sub-task from my ticket so that the relationship between the two can be pulled up later into reports. For example, I may have a task to build a new vm, and need to open tasks for networking, security accounts, software installation and so on. By opening sub-tasks from my assignment, the time spent by all parties concerned is tied together for more meaningful cost accounting.
They currently don't have all of their products incorporated into the Tachyon web interface, meaning that we need a separate administration console for using their Shopping product.
The 1E Tachyon Exchange is an online repository for common or useful instructions, but it is still a bit lacking. New instructions aren't published very often.
Writing your own custom instructions for Tachyon Explorer has a bit of a learning curve if you aren't already familiar with SQL queries or their SCALE language. There is published documentation for SCALE, but I'd like to see them add a basic functionality course to their online training portal.
It is hard to find areas for improvement, the tool is very powerful. That said, building the CMDB still involves some manual interaction which was not how it was presented in demos.
The CMDB data is almost too deep and detailed. When you build the relationship map it can be so large that it is overwhelming. You can limit this, but the default maps are massive if you are discovering lots of device classes.
The product is expensive. Since they are the leader in the industry and the product has tons of features, they definitely charge for it!
To be completely honest setting up a new ticketing system can be a pain in the ass. Once you have it setup and customized the way you want it, you don't want to switch unless you're unhappy with the product. Unless future releases and updates really muck the system up, I wouldn't change.
1E Tachyon has plenty of features and functionality right out of the box. They offer a Tachyon Exchange web portal where you can go to download new Tachyon product packs as they become available through consulting engagements and customer requests. Sometimes you might need to do something more specific or customized than what is available to everyone, and that's when your own knowledge is put to the test. Being able to write your own SCALE code would be invaluable, but takes a while to learn if you aren't already familiar with SQL, PowerShell, or a few other popular languages. Making it your own can definitely take some work, but it's worth it in the end.
The dashboard is so confusing, [there are] many clicks to open a task and search by a ticket. The Enterprise customisation [we did] has finished to kill the software and creates a really bad experience on a daily basis. [It is] So slow, and so many clicks to process a ticket. Works only on IE so, that [should] make you realize that [it] is a bad idea.
I would give it this rating because we have had no major issues with the support for ServiceNow after we implemented it at our organization. They seem to respond promptly and efficiently if we ever do need to open a support case with them about an issue we are having.
To type in what should be a text box, you have to click an empty cell, a tiny text box pop up opens with a check box and an X. You the. Type in the text box and have to click the check mark. If you have a bunch of fields to fill out, doing this is very annoying. Absolutely know thought went in to this. I'm sure somebody in marketing thought it was a good idea. It wasn't.
Without exception, every client I have worked with has been very happy with their resulting product. While this is partly due to my work, I must point out that the platform is the winning decision, not the implementer.
Microsoft has good intentions, but they are often late to the table. On more than one occasion, we have seen Microsoft incorporate a new feature into their own products, but it's something that 1E had already been offering for a year or more. By the time Microsoft adds a new feature, it has already been in our 1E toolbox and even then doesn't seem to have all of the additional functionality that we get from the 1E software. Currently, we're starting to see Microsoft's push for endpoint performance analytics, which 1E Tachyon has already done impressively for some time now.
We used to use Jira to handle service tickets but it's way too robust for something this straightforward. Due to the nature of Jira, you needed to already have a lot of documentation and knowledge about who should be assigned the ticket, so the lift of creating a ticket was time consuming.
Being able to deploy configuration changes while devices are off-network was a real-life-saver for us during the sudden work-from-home scenarios we faced during the pandemic.
Reclaiming unused software licenses has provided some additional budget to use towards other products, and helps us to justify the cost of what we already have.
Using Experience to proactively troubleshoot performance issues not only reduces the number of help desk tickets but also provides a better work environment for our employees.
Overall ServiceNow has a positive impact on getting the SLA of tickets down in supporting our customers.
One negative impact has been the amount of time to get the product to produce an ROI, it's almost too big to fail and too big to replace. You almost become committed to the product. Good or bad.
Another negative impact would be if you track metrics of employees and time tracking, there is a lot of scenarios where engineers will track time on tickets but not get credit for closing them as the assignee function of tickets can only be tied to one user and credits only the engineer who closes the ticket.
Another positive impact would be the level of security for permissions and scaling the workloads is robust and you will get out of the system what your team is willing to put in.
