Jenkins vs. ServiceNow IT Service Management vs. TeamCity

Jenkins is a highly customizable CI/CD tool with excellent community support. One can use Jenkins to build and deploy monolith services to microservices with ease. It can handle multiple "builds" per agent simultaneously, but the process can be resource hungry, and you need some impressive specs server for that. With Jenkins, you can automate almost any task. Also, as it is an open source, we can save a load of money by not spending on enterprise CI/CD tools.

Incentivized

It is well suited for medium to large companies that require a tool to allow users to create IT requests, have a self-service portal, track the completion of such requests and have access to KPIs to understand the satisaction level of the requestors. It is not the best tool if you want to have a heavy personalized IT Service Management tool to cater to all your needs or when you want to have an easy way to search for past tickets using specific keywords.

Incentivized

TeamCity is very quick and straightforward to get up and running. A new server and a handful of agents could be brought online in easily under an hour. The professional tier is completely free, full-featured, and offers a huge amount of growth potential. TeamCity does exceptionally well in a small-scale business or enterprise setting.

Incentivized

• Automated Builds: Jenkins is configured to monitor the version control system for new pull requests. Once a pull request is created, Jenkins automatically triggers a build process. It checks out the code, compiles it, and performs any necessary build steps specified in the configuration.
• Unit Testing: Jenkins runs the suite of unit tests defined for the project. These tests verify the functionality of individual components and catch any regressions or errors. If any unit tests fail, Jenkins marks the build as unsuccessful, and the developer is notified to fix the issues.
• Code Analysis: Jenkins integrates with code analysis tools like SonarQube or Checkstyle. It analyzes the code for quality, adherence to coding standards, and potential bugs or vulnerabilities. The results are reported back to the developer and the product review team for further inspection.

Incentivized

• Integration
• Good search capabilities. Applications are created within CMDB and we can search for the app to see the changes, incidents and problems created
• Reporting. Great store of MIS reports and will let you to create custom reports
• Visual Task Boards - use it as Kanban boards

• TeamCity provides a great integration with git, especially Bitbucket.
• When a new code release (build) fails TeamCity has a great tool for investigation and troubleshooting.
• TeamCity provides a user-friendly interface. While some technical knowledge is required to use TeamCity, the design helps simply things.

Incentivized

• The UI could be slightly better, it feels kind of like the 90s, but it works well.
• An easier way to filter jobs other than views on the dashboard.
• An easier way to read the console logs when tests do fail.

Incentivized

• Finding requests that I opened and have since been completed by the assigned group/individual is very difficult to accomplish unless I've written down the request numbers somewhere.
• Requests that I opened and are subsequently closed, often continue to appear in the list of "My Open Requests" giving the appearance that they were not completed when in fact they were.
• It may exist, but if it does I haven't found it yet, which makes it less than intuitive, but I would like to see the ability to recall a request in ServiceNow.
• I believe our firewall rule change request for is a custom form, but it has a serious drawback. If I submit such a request and need to make a correction to it before it is approved, there isn't anyway for me to do so. The request has to first be rejected with the creation of a sub-task in order to edit it before it is resubmitted for approval.

Incentivized

• The customization is still fairly complex and is best managed by a dev support team. There is great flexibility, but with flexibility comes responsibility. It isn't always obvious to a developer how to make simple customizations.
• Sometimes the process for dealing with errors in the process isn't obvious. Some paths to rerunning steps redo dependencies unnecessarily while other paths that don't are less obvious.

Incentivized

We have a certain buy-in as we have made a lot of integrations and useful tools around jenkins, so it would cost us quite some time to change to another tool. Besides that, it is very versatile, and once you have things set up, it feels unnecessary to change tool. It is also a plus that it is open source.

Incentivized

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.

Jenkins streamlines development and provides end to end automated integration and deployment. It even supports Docker and Kubernetes using which container instances can be managed effectively. It is easy to add documentation and apply role based access to files and services using Jenkins giving full control to the users. Any deviation can be easily tracked using the audit logs.

Incentivized

It has helped us a lot, and after some training and getting to know the product, we are quite comfortable with it and feel much more capable of understanding what's going on in our IT environment. The only reason it doesn't get a perfect score from me is that there is a learning curve for both end users and IT admins using ServiceNow. Once you customize the UI and remove unnecessary fields. You are left with a very clean product that does what it needs to and does it well.

Incentivized

We have never had any issues with ServiceNow's availability that I am aware of in the two years I have been using it.

Incentivized

No, when we integrated this with GitHub, it becomes more easy and smart to manage and control our workforce. Our distributed workforce is now streamlined to a single bucket. All of our codes and production outputs are now automatically synced with all the workers. There are many cases when our in-house team makes changes in the release, our remote workers make another release with other environment variables. So it is better to get all of the work in control.

Incentivized

For a massive system, page loads are reasonably quick, including searches.

Incentivized

TeamCity runs really well, even when sharing a small instance with other applications. The user interface adequately conveys important information without being overly bloated, and it is snappy. There isn't any significant overhead to build agents or unit test runners that we have measured.

Incentivized

As with all open source solutions, the support can be minimal and the information that you can find online can at times be misleading. Support may be one of the only real downsides to the overall software package. The user community can be helpful and is needed as the product is not the most user-friendly thing we have used.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

It is worth well the time to setup Jenkins in a docker container. It is also well worth to take the time to move any "Jenkins configuration" into Jenkinsfiles and not take shortcuts.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Overall, Jenkins is the easiest platform for someone who has no experience to come in and use effectively. We can get a junior engineer into Jenkins, give them access, and point them in the right direction with minimal hand-holding. The competing products I have used (TravisCI/GitLab/Azure) provide other options but can obfuscate the process due to the lack of straightforward simplicity. In other areas (capability, power, customization), Jenkins keeps up with the competition and, in some areas, like customization, exceeds others.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

TeamCity is a great on-premise Continuous Integration tool. Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) is a hosted SAAS application in Microsoft's Cloud. VSTS is a Source Code Repository, Build and Release System, and Agile Project Management Platform - whereas TeamCity is a Build and Release System only. TeamCity's interface is easier to use than VSTS, and neither have a great deployment pipeline solution. But VSTS's natural integration with Microsoft products, Microsoft's Cloud, Integration with Azure Active Directory, and free, private, Source Code repository - offer additional features and capabilities not available with Team City alone.

Incentivized

ServiceNow works as an enterprise solution.

Incentivized

• Faster Time-to-Market: Jenkins automate the build, testing, and deployment process, enabling faster feedback and continuous improvement.
• Improved Quality: Jenkins automatically run unit tests and integration tests, ensuring that code changes meet the necessary quality standards.
• Cost Savings: Jenkins is an open-source tool that is free to use

Incentivized

• We don't currently have a CMDB, so we are leveraging ServiceNow to build one using their ITSM and ITOM tools. This is a huge gap for us as a company and it will be a big win once this is in place.
• The core help desk functions are comparable to most other tools on the market, but SN does a great job of integrating that data with other modules like Problem, Change and Event Management to provide a truly integrated solution.
• The tool is expensive, so you will need to try to do as much as you can with the platform. We currently use other systems for HAM and SAM but will be including these in our ServiceNow instance in the future to help maximize our ROI.

Incentivized

• TeamCity has greatly improved team efficiency by streamlining our production and pre-production pipelines. We moved to TeamCity after seeing other teams have more success with it than we had with other tools.
• TeamCity has helped the reliability of our product by easily allowing us to integrate unit testing, as well as full integration testing. This was not possible with other tools given our corporate firewall.
• TeamCity's ability to include Docker containers in the pipeline steps has been crucial in improving our efficiency and reliability.

Incentivized