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.
$10,000
per year
Snow License Manager
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Snow License Manager enables organizations to gain an accurate view of software usage and entitlements. Organizations can then dynamically reconcile these findings against license entitlements to optimize their IT environments and be audit-ready. HOW IT WORKS Snow License Manager is the central hub for the Snow Software Asset Management platform, providing a unified view of installed software, SaaS, cloud resources and hardware. With Snow License Manager, usage data is…
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.
I have said at a number of events that I have attended, where other suppliers have shown their latest and greatest new thing, it is the fundamentals that need to work, and need to work well, and this is what Snow License Manager does. It does not take a team of 100 staff to get the tool working or to keep the tool functioning, it works and is stable out of the box. We have learnt that putting the right processes in at the start means that Snow License Manager can do what it has been designed to do and what we have paid for it to do. Audits from vendors now days are relatively simple actions, with the Snow License Manager doing it's job we can quickly run a report and know exactly what our position is and then act accordingly, quick, simple and accurate data at your finger tips, as long as you put the work in to enter the license details etc. If Snow License Manager could invent a robot to go around the business and find all these bits of paper for us then that would be perfect.
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.
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.
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.
While the deployment is fairly easy, updating the agent can be tedious. For one, each new version needs a request to customer support, but too it's not possible to "update" the old version rather than reinstall the new one. The lack of customization/configuration possible for the SnowAgent installer is irritating. Putting that aside, once the system is set up it's fairly easy to maintain and with very few hiccups, update. It overall runs very smoothly with little to no error.
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.
Support for the most part is responsive, but there are times when it takes more time than I would like to resolve. But then, most of the time it is related to growing pains and the fact I do not have a Dev/Test environment to test items and upgrades before going to Production
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.
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.
The deciding factor for the decision makers was the combination of license management and utilization statistics. Our desktop people wanted the utilization and reporting to be very granular and close to real time. Snow was purchased because they promoted their real time utilization in addition to the license management, alerting and reporting. To my knowledge, only Snow was given a proof of concept before the decision was made.
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.
