Chapter 1. Getting Started with Service-Now

Service-Now, probably is the most spoken IT Operation / IT Service Management application/tool these days. So what exactly is Service-Now and what does it does? Service-Now is the cloud-based enterprise application which offers everything-as-a-service, Service-Now has large portfolio of services including platform as service, finance, marketing, field operation and so on. Service-Now holds vital position in the market of IT service management, IT operations management and IT business management applications. If anyone asks me what it is, then I always say that it may be an application/tool which might address most of your IT operational issues. If we go the little further on application level then we can say that Service-Now application is the collection of many small applications which are committed to different processes. Service-Now does provide the capability to application developers to develop a desired application in less time as well, which makes it more powerful and preferred to the customers. Many IT and non IT companies are moving from their legacy service management suites / help desk tools to the cloud-based Service-Now. So, the question that arises is, why is Service-Now attracting many IT and non IT customers? To answer this question, we should go to the ground zero of Service-Now, which will help to understand Service-Now from delivering business values. I will start with the ground zero of Service-Now and will gradually move toward the top with some very interesting recipes.

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

Service-Now prerequisite
Service-Now and ITIL framework
Understanding Service-Now procurement
Understanding Service-Now roles and licensing
Understanding Service-Now setup
Accessing Service-Now application
Microsoft Active Directory authentication
Logging in to the Service-Now application portal or end user view
Creating service requests from the Service-Now portal
Understanding the Service-Now IT view
Understanding Service-Now self-service application
Understanding Service-Now service desk application
Understand Unique record identifier
Using the incident management application
How to use create related lists of applications
Using the problem management application
Using the change management application
Creating the change / problem task from incident task

Introduction

Many customers from different industries such as banking, insurance, manufacturing, oil, and gas are using Service-Now software, but please keep in mind that every practice or customer may have its own unique operational environment. So now let's begin the Service-Now journey! You know by now that Service-Now is a service management suite but if you are thinking that it is the only one in the service management applications market then you are not correct. Names that come to my mind when I think about the other service management tools include: BMC Remedy, HP Service Manager, and VMWARE Service Manager.

Service-Now is based on the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework, which is an integrated, process based, best practice framework for managing IT services. The recipes in this chapter will give you a detailed overview of the Service-Now modules and the ITIL v3.0 framework, and we will also see how Service-Now is leveraging the ITIL framework.

Service-Now prerequisites

To start with Service-Now, you should have a basic understanding of Java scripting and SQL. Please keep in mind that as an admin or developer you are not allowed to access the database layer or application code layer but Service-Now provides its own classes, functions, and methods for development and other work. In addition, if we talk about the supporting technology behind this application, then Service-Now is Java-based and uses Oracle, MySQL, and SQL server databases and as a web server, Tomcat is being used.

Service-Now and the ITIL framework

Service-Now is an IT service management tool and it follows the ITIL v3.0 framework but, now Service-Now is currently expanding its footprint into many other portfolios as well, such as legal management, marketing management, and cost management and so on.

How it works...

The ITIL v3.0 framework has five phases, but Service-Now has supporting modules or applications for the following ITIL phases only:

Service design
Service transition
Service operation

The following phases are not supported by Service-Now:

Service strategy
Continual service improvement
ITIL v3.0 Framework - Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITIL
ITIL v3.0 Framework

Understanding Service-Now procurement

Service-Now is a cloud-based tool. The entire application infrastructure is maintained by Service-Now and many customers prefer to be in the Service-Now environment because of the cost constraint, but if a customer's security standards are very high, then Service-Now also gives an option to the client to opt for hosting Service-Now in their own environment. In addition, Service-Now provides the VPN connection option from Service-Now to the customer network. After processing the sales orders, Service-Now provides three environments (one production and two non-production). If any customer wants more than three environments, such as, for example, a training instance for training new end users, then the customer can ask Service-Now to provide an extra instance, but the customer may need to pay extra to Service-Now.

Understanding Service-Now roles and licensing

Each and every company has its own license model, or to put it a better way, a method whereby a company will charge customers for using its products or services. There are various types of licenses available in the market, such as, for example, named user licenses, volume licenses, and client access licenses. Service-Now, has a role-based license model. For instance, if in your company 1,000 employees are working, then all employees will have access to Service-Now as an end user, which means they are allowed to raise requests or incidents on Service-Now, but for handling all those service tickets there are one 100 IT employees and all have Service-Now ITIL role access: According to for the Service-Now licensing model, your company would need to pay for 100 licenses only.

In an IT operational environment, a requester may be referred to as an end user who can do any of these tasks:

Create, view, or modify their own request
Search service catalog
Access knowledge base
Access public pages
Undertake surveys
Set own notification preferences
View assets assigned to a user
Initiate a chat session, or access and post to live feed.

In an IT operational environment, a fulfiller may be referred to as a support group member who can perform all the tasks of a requester, as well as the following tasks:

Create, delete, and modify any record
View, create, delete, and modify any report
Perform development and administrative activities, and approve requests routed to a user

In an IT operational environment, an approver is a manager, a lead, or a high-level management person who can perform all the tasks of requesters and can also approve or deny a routed record.

In my experience, many customers don't want to purchase an approver license for various reasons.

Approval by e-mail is counted as a license. In such special cases, you can deactivate the my approval module from the self-service application so that the module won't be visible to users and can create approval e-mails for all kinds of requests with the help of e-mail templates.

There's more…

As a Service-Now application administrator, you should be always careful before giving role to any user as there may be some approvals are required from higher management. This is why it's very important to know the roles in Service-Now.

Note

In my experience, many customers don't want to purchase an approver licenses due to for various reasons. Usually Approval by e-mail is not counted as license but clients contracts varies as well. In such special cases, you can deactivate the My Approval module from Self-Service Application so that the module won't be visible for users and can create approval e-mails for all kinds of requests with the help of Email Templates module.

Understanding the Service-Now setup

Service-Now is a cloud-based application; that's why your client is not required to set up any infrastructure to support Service-Now in their environment. By reading the Understanding Service-Now procurement recipe, you should know that Service-Now provides three environments (one production and two non-production). As a setup, these environments are called instances and may be classified as development, testing, and production. Consider the following examples of Service-Now instances or web addresses:

packtprod.service-now.com
packtdev.service-now.com
packtest.service-now.com

If the customer is Amazon and has requested more than three instances from Service-Now, then the web addresses may look similar to the following:

amazon.service-now.com
amazondev.service-now.com
amazonqa.service-now.com
amazondev2.service-now.com

Each Service-Now instance has a unique, secured web address, but administrators are allowed to create a custom URL which can redirect to the original URL.

Accessing the Service-Now application

You don't need to install any client-side application on your local machine to access Service-Now in your environment. It is easily accessible by a standard web browser, which makes it appear as a web browser application for a customer. Here it is important to note that instance addresses or links (http://{instancename}.service-now.com) will always be company specific.

Getting ready

To access Service-Now, you need a standard web browser (you may use Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, or Mozilla Firefox) to access the URL with an active Service-Now instance, and valid credentials.

How to do it...

Open any standard web browser.
Type the Service-Now instance web address provided for your company in the address bar (http://{instance_name}.service-now.com).
If customer has given external authentication, then are you are automatically logged in. To read more about external authentication follow: http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=External_Authentication_(Single_Sign-On_-_SSO) link.
If customer has not been given external authentication, then you will see a login page as follows, where you need to enter the User name and Password in the respective fields:
Service-Now login screen
Now click on the Login button. If your credentials match, then Service-Now will allow you to move further and show the following application screen:
Service-Now application screen
If your credentials do not match, then Service-Now denies access and shows you the following error message as follows:
Service-Now error screen

How it works...

If an external authentication is not being used, then the User name and Password authentication is done by the Service-Now user table (sys_user), which will serve only as the master source of the user's data. So, when you enter the username and password, Service-Now verifies the user's account against the user table and after successful verification, Service-Now allows you to move further. However, if Service-Now is not able to match the credentials you entered, then it does not allow you to login and show error message.

There's more…

Each Service-Now instance has unique, secured web address but administrators are allowed to create a custom URL which can redirect to original URL. Here it is important to note that instances address (http ://{ instance_name}.service-now.com) will be always company specific.

Microsoft Active Directory authentication

It's not feasible to manually maintain a large set of users in any enterprise level application. This is why every organization maintains a master source of all users on a server. So, Service-Now should be integrated with the master source to import users for user's access.

Getting ready

In many organizations, the Microsoft Active Directory server is used as the master source of employee or user records. Users are allowed to log into the assigned laptop or desktop using active directory's or Windows username and password. Service-Now provides an inbuilt Lightweight Dictionary Access Protocol (LDAP) server to integrate with Microsoft Active Directory to import all users' records. To step through this recipe, all you need is an active Service-Now instance and valid credentials and an admin role.

How to do it...

Open a standard web browser and type the web address (http://{instance_address}.service-now.com) of the ServiceNow instance which is provided by the organization.
Now, for instance, if Service-Now is integrated with Microsoft Azure, then you will see the following login page:
Microsoft Azure page for Service-Now login
Now, on the login page, enter active directory's username and password to log in. Please note, active directory's username and password are commonly referred to as windows credentials, as by this, you are allowed to log in on your organization's machine.
On successful authentication, Service-Now, will allow you to log in to move further but if the username and password are not matched, then Service-Now will show an error message.
Sometimes, you may observe that some fields in a user's records are not being imported in the Service-Now user table (sys_user) properly so, in such cases, you may ask for access to Microsoft active directory where you can validate whether data is available in active directory or not. Refer to the following screenshot to see what the user record looks like in active directory:
User details in active directory server

How it works...

When the user enters the network domain credentials (username and password) on the login page, the Service-Now instance passes it to the LDAP server and the LDAP server responds with an authorized or unauthorized message which Service-Now determines whether to grant access or not. It is important to note that Service-Now can allow new users to login to an instance even if the user does not have an account. When the new user tries to login in to Service-Now, it automatically issues a query to the LDAP server and if the user record is found, the integration tries to authenticate it with the password. If the password is valid, Service-Now creates an account for the user.

There's more...

There are mainly two types of accounts – the network domain level account (authorized by the LDAP server – active directory integration) and the manual account (which is directly created in the Service-Now user table). So, for instance, if your customer's active directory server is not available or is down, then Service-Now will not allow any user to login on the instance because the LDAP query authentication fails. However, if as an admin, you want to access Service-Now, then you can access it via the manual account which is not authenticated by LDAP server. It is important to note that as an admin, you should have a non-AD or manual account for critical situations.

Logging in to the Service-Now application portal or end user view

Out of the box, Service-Now provides a Content Management System (CMS) application, which is the soul of the Service-Now front-end (portal). By using the CMS application, you can create web pages and enhance the look and feel of the Service-Now platform for the end users. It is a single place from where all users can raise incidents or requests. If you are a beginner and you not aware of incidents or service requests, then read the following standard definitions:

An incident is an unplanned interruption to an IT Service or reduction in the quality of an IT service (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incident management_ (ITSM)).
A service request is a user request for information or advice, or for a standard change (a pre-approved change that is low risk, relatively common, and follows a procedure), or for access to an IT service. An example of a standard request is a password reset (source: https://www.sunviewsoftware.com).

In this recipe, you will learn about the Service-Now CMS site basics and navigation as an end user.

Getting ready

To step through this recipe, you should have an active Service-Now instance and valid credentials only.

How to do it...

Open any standard web browser.
Type the service-now instance web address (http://{instance_name}.service-now.com) provided by your company in the address bar.
By default, upon login, you will see the home page but, depending on the login rule, you may be redirected to the Service-Now portal or end user view. To read more about the login landing page click http://wiki.servicenow.com/index.php?title=Specifying_a_Login_Landing_Page#gsc.tab=0 link.
On the Service-Now platform, you are allowed to create more than one site but the URL suffix must be different for each and every site. By default, Service-Now provides the site by web address (http://{instance_name}.service-now.com/ess). You can also create a new site by web address (http://{instance_name}.Service-Now.com/IT). It is important to note that the instance name must be same.
The following screen shows the default portal of Service-Now, which the end user will see after login based on the landing page configuration:
Service-Now frontend (portal)/end user view
Now after login, you are allowed to create a service ticket (incident, task or service request). It is important to note that every organization configures Service-Now as per their business requirements so sometimes only middle-level managers, such as team leader or manager, are allowed to create service requests on your behalf. . Let's understand this by an example so if you are joining a new organization on contractor position then to start work from day one you need certain things access like laptop, printer access, VoIP access, application access and so on, then in such scenarios the only manager or lead raise service request so don’t be surprised by such kind of Service-Now configuration.
Often, a user wants to follow up on a service ticket so for fulfilling such a requirement, Service-Now provides a search facility by Zing, which is a text indexing and search engine. As an admin or end user, you can enter the ticket number in the search box as given following but it is important to note that end user has access level is less as compared to admin’s access level. For an example as an admin if you enter incident number INC0010108 in search box:
Search incident on CMS
Service-Now allows for a text search on the CMS site as well. You can type the desired text in the search box and you will see a page similar to the following screenshot. It is important to note that Service-Now search criteria are limited to Tasks, Live Feed, Policy, People & Places, Knowledge & catalog, and you can filter out any of them by unchecking the respective box:

There's more…

Out of the box, Service-Now provides Content Management Application (CMS) which supports application portal or end user view. Under CMS application, Login Rules module supports landing page of portal after successful login. For better understanding let’s take an example, users without any roles should be redirected to Service-Now portal and with user ITIL, should be redirected to IT View