Progress Chef vs. ServiceNow IT Service Management

Chef is a fantastic tool for automating software deployments that aren't able to be containerized. It's more developer-oriented than its other competitors and thus allows you to do more with it. The Chef Infra Server software is rock-solid and has been extremely stable in our experience. I would definitely recommend its use if you're looking for an automation framework. And it also offers InSpec which is a very good tool for testing your infrastructure to ensure it deployed as intended.

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We found that ServiceNow's ITSM product is overall a great product to use in all areas of IT. Whether it be Security, Infrastructure, or Networking, nothing is too complicated to bring into ServiceNow for processing. Being able to use flows to automate task creation and auto assign has helped to fill process gaps that existed with our previous product.

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• Chef is great at deploying code to both small and large groups of servers.
• We use chef to standup new servers as well as deploy updated code to existing servers and it does this very well.
• Being able to make a change and have it push manually or automatically to any subset of servers has changed the landscape of how our IT teams operate.

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• 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

• Chef could do a better job with integration with other DevOps tools. Our company relies on Jenkins and Ansible, which took some development and convincing for plug-ins to be created/available.
• It would be nice if kitchen didn't only have a vagrant/virtual-box prerequisite. Our company one day stop allowing virtual-box to run without special privileges, and that caused a lot of issues for people trying to do kitchen tests.
• Chef could use more practice materials for the advanced certification badges. There was not a lot of guidance in what to study or examples of certain topics.

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• 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.

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Excellent rating for exceptional service provided for efficiency and efficient output given by it. It helped both client as well business to coordinate better for the requirements they work. It help to generate reports for real time progress on task. It helps to keep active watch on progress made by all parties

The suite of tools is very powerful. The ability to create custom modules allows for unlimited potential for managing all aspects of a system. However, there is pretty significant learning curve with the toolset. It currently takes approx 3-4 months for new engineers to feel comfortable with our implementation

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The basic actions of creating, updating and tracking requests is easy to udnerstand and use. Only a short onboarding training is needed to train the users of how to use it properly. However, the UI/UX experience can feel bloated with the many options it offers when you start to customize the tool to your company needs. It is also not the best looking user interface compared to more modern web applications.

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

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It loads quick enough for basically all our systems. Because we have this for local dev environments, speed isn't really a big issue here. Yes, depending on the system, sometimes it does take a relatively long time, but it's not an issue for me. One thing that is annoying is that if I want to make a small change to a cookbook and re-run the Chef client, I can't just make the change in the cache and run it. I have to do the whole process of updating the server.

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

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Support for Chef is easily available for fee or through the open source community as most the issues you will face will have been addressed through the Chef developer community forums. The documentation for Chef is moderate to great and easily readable.

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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.

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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.

While implementation the focus always should be on customizing features which are out of box to minimize the debts following the main features like Incidents, Requests, Change & Problem Statement. It should be strictly ensured to maintain right data quality, eliminating any duplicates or wrong workflows and incorrect reportings. Strong security and goverance to be implemented.

We considered the three leading competitors in the field: Chef, Puppet and Ansible. Ansible is a very strong competitor and has a nice degree of flexibility in that it does not require a client install. Instead the configuration is delivered by SSH which is very simple. Puppet seems like it has fallen off the pace of the competition and lacked the strong community offered by Chef. We chose Chef because of the strong support by the company and the dynamic and deep community support.

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Having used other ticketing/asset tools in the past with other companies. This time, we opted for ServiceNow, primarily because of the company's scale. Once you start hiring a lot of employees, you need a robust tool with some maturity. We wanted to split the IT team into back-office and front-office teams. We needed proper permissions and auto-escalation. Also, approval flows for certain requests (mostly hardware and file access requests). All of this is part of the standard ServiceNow package. Some of the cheaper alternatives we felt were more suited for very small businesses or teams.

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The pricing seemed inline with our products in this space. Nothing out of the ordinary in contract, term, or pricing structure

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ServiceNow works as an enterprise solution.

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The entire professional services team was great to work with. The curriculum was tailored to our specific use cases. The group we worked with were very responsive, listened to our feedback, was very easy to schedule and accommodate. I cannot say enough good things about our professional services experience

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• Chef is a good tool for baselining servers. It will be a good ROI when there are huge number of servers. For less number of servers maintaining a master will be an over head.
• One good ROI will be that the Operations Team also gets into agile and DevOps methodologies. Operational teams can start writing scripts/automations to keep their infra more stable and their application stack more reliable.
• Implementation of Chef eliminates the manual mode of doing things and everyone aligns to automation mind set. It helps in change of culture.

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• Personally as an end-user, I feel like my issues have been resolved more quickly/don't tend to get as lost when using previous tools.
• Having a centralized place where all questions are asked and all issues are resolved means I don't have to spend time searching for the appropriate team. I can just create a ticket and it's channeled to the appropriate team for me.

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