ServiceNow

ServiceNow is a cloud-based platform enterprise application platform that supports IT Service Management. It helps you to convert IT Business Management. It was founded in 2004 by Fred Luddy, he is the previous CTO of software companies like Peregrine Systems and Remedy Co-operation. ServiceNow is mainly focused on service-oriented towards the tasks, activities, and processes. It provides all the information to the technician to diagnose and repair all the issues while removing the dependency on spreadsheets and emails.

Why ServiceNow?

A ServiceNow system of action lets you replace unstructured work patterns of the past workflows with the future. ServiceNow provides cloud service for the entire enterprise.

There are some reasons that show why ServiceNow is integral for enterprise:

1) IT: ServiceNow can help increase ability and lower costs by consolidating legacy tools into a modern, easy to use service management solution into a cloud. It offers visibility to end-to-end business by understanding the relationships with the underlying resources.

2) BUSINESS MANAGEMENT: Business Management is a portfolio planning and execution of tools. It helps you to focus on the areas which need to higher attention and acceleration time of values

3) SECURITY: Security can collaborate with IT to resolve their threats faster, for doing this it uses a structured response engine to priorities and resolve incident base of service based.

4) HR: HR can consumerize the employee service experience with self-service portals and get the insights they need to continually improve since delivery.

5) CUSTOMER SERVICE: Customer service loyalty-up by assessing product service health in real time and working across all the departments to quickly solve the service issues.

Who uses ServiceNow?

1)Employees: Employee uses it for their IT Business Services.

2)IT Support Team: Uses it to manage service requests and updates.

3)Administrators: User access, roles, and privilege management.

4)Developers: Create new functionality with a script to extended standard configurations.

Features of ServiceNow:

1) Better support customers with low maintenance cost.

2) Data confidentiality and integrity.

3) Improved operational tracking.

4) Instance-based implementation.

5) Real-time analysis and support.

ServiceNow Capabilities

Authentication: Single Sign-on (SSO) is the essence of any tool with service no different. This tool has multiple provider SSO features. An organization can use some SSO ID(Identity Provider) to manage authentication. SSO enables a user to enter into an application without User ID or Password, it uses Windows User ID and Password.

Web Services: The platform provides the capability of publishing or consuming the API at the same time. SOAP, WSDL or REST API are the protocols supported. You can either create API or use Scripted ones.

LDAP: It providing access to applications or maintaining outlook distribution lists. It LDAP integration is a small thing for ServiceNow tool, the best thing is you do not have to code anything, everything is simple configuration.

Orchestration: ServiceNow enables the orchestrating or automation or complex tasks on a remote server. Once the orchestration implanted in an IT company, the entire work requires less skill.

Overview of IT Service Management:

IT Service Management(ITSM): It is a set of processes, procedures, and policies for handling the implementation, development, and supports of customer-oriented IT services.

ITSM encompasses multiple IT management frameworks that can be applied to centralized and decentralized systems. There are many numbers of frameworks which come under the ITSM discipline, and some address specific it needs, including those in government, healthcare or technology. Many businesses using ITSM consider IT as a service, with an aim to deliver valuable services to customers, rather than a department that manages technology.

ITSM Frameworks

There are many frameworks available for business, but, IT Infrastructure Library commonly used framework for ITSM. Selecting a framework depending on the business needs and industry specifications is important to generate productive outcomes.

The following are some of the important frameworks:

1) IT Infrastructure Library: ITIL is a framework dedicated to delivering IT services of best practices.

2) Business Process Framework: It is designed for telecommunications service providers.

3) COBIT: COBIT is an IT governance framework.

4) Six Sigma: Six Sigma is used for data analysis to minimize product and service flaws.

5) FitSM: FitSM is a framework which is provided at service management.

ServiceNow Infrastructure:

ServiceNow provides a platform and applications as a service. The hardware, Internet connectivity, and operating system security and provide you with the Url( www.servicenow.com ).

An instance is an independent implementation of ServiceNow. It is isolated and autonomous, the meaning of your instance is not shared with other customers. ServiceNow uses a single-tenancy architecture, which means your instance is yours; you can do want you to want to do with it; such as changing logic, updating the UI and adding fields..

ServiceNow Plugins:

All ServiceNow functionalities are delivered as a plugin. When a plugin is turned on, all the data and configuration that the application needs is loaded into the databases, that means it is ready for work in just a few moments.

ServiceNow Hosted Instance:

ServiceNow hosted instance is divided over two physical datacenters, a high-availability pair. Each and every location runs independently of the other, giving a semi-clustered environment. The process of switching between locations which are used for maintenance procedures, enabling your instance to be well-protected against hardware and other failures

The Nodes

A ServiceNow is made up of many several application and database servers and nodes. These are generally running shared hardware, meaning that although your instance logically instance and separate and independent. It is physically hosted alongside another customer . There are generally at least two applications nodes, each running a copy of the ServiceNow platform, which works together to share a load .. Even though you’ll never directly log in to these worker nodes, they perform some background processing, allowing the interactive application servers to respond more quickly to user requests.

The Database:

Once you logged into a ServiceNow instance we can see the database records. All most everything I ServiceNow is an entry in a database. When we look at the user interface, virtually everything we can see, from a data typed in by a user, to log files, to how the views are structured. stored in the instance’s relational database. The scripts are kept in a string field in a record, and the uploaded files are stored in chunks in the database.

Everything is built on the top of this structure. It doesn’t need to reboot the server to apply new functionality, just updating data records, don`t need to reload configuration files, any properties you set will be read on the next operation. Even the database metadata, information about the fields themselves, are stored in another table.

ServiceNow is a high-level platform that is based on the concept of Model-View-Controller. Building a ServiceNow application, you can first think of the data structure. It needs to store and how it all links together, creating tables and fields. This is the model aspect.

Automatically, you get a simple view of this data, with forms and lists showing your information.

And it can build simple ways to manipulate and change the data, through automation and simple manual updates. This is the controller aspect.

Reference: https://www.servicenow.com/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ServiceNow

ServiceNow Tutorial