ServiceNow Tutorial

Servicenow Tutorial for developers

Welcome to the ServiceNow Tutorial, ServiceNow is a software platform that supports IT service management and automates common business processes.

ServiceNow offers evolutionary IT management software as a service (SaaS) through a forms-based workflow system for IT service automation, resource management and shared services. Modern technology, commitment to partnership and a highly experienced and passionate team translate into superior ServiceNow customer success and elite company growth.

ServiceNow is a global software development company founded in 2003 by Fred Luddy, former chief technology officer of Peregrine Systems and Remedy Corporation. The company is headquartered in San Diego, CA with offices throughout the US, EMEA, Asia, Australia and customers in more than 48 countries.

ServiceNow is dedicated to the development, implementation and support of IT management applications offered via the Internet in the software as a service (SaaS) model. ServiceNow licensing is subscription-based and includes access to all applications, the hosting infrastructure and maintenance, support, training and three automated upgrades per year.

ServiceNow represents one of the fastest-growing software companies in the world with more than triple-digit revenue growth year-over-year. In FY2010, the company again demonstrated growth of more than 100% remains cash flow positive and profitable and continues to hold substantial cash reserves.

SaaS: Software as a Service, sometimes referred to as “on-demand software”, is a software delivery model where software and any data associated with it are hosted off-site, typically over the internet. ServiceNow hosts all software and data centrally at the ServiceNow server farms and is accessed via the internet on a web browser. VPN is not needed to access Service Now.

PaaS: Platform as a Service is the delivery of a computing platform and solution stack as a service. This means that users need only to buy the service, but do not have to worry about maintaining the underlying hardware and software.

Logging in to ServiceNow

Assuming users are logged into Yale’s network, they will be automatically logged in to ServiceNow. To access Yale’s ServiceNow website, simply go to yaleproduction.service-now.com in the web browser if your choice. The user will be automatically logged in by Yale’s Active Directory system.

Homepage

When Logged in, users will be presented with the ITIL Homepage.

ServiceNow & Improving IT Service Management

ServiceNow is dedicated to improving the industry's opinion of the value software delivers. ServiceNow develops, implements and supports a suite of on-demand IT service management applications offered via the Internet as software as a service (SaaS). These applications are licensed on a simple and economical subscription basis.

ServiceNow is redefining the IT management market, providing a new opportunity for organisations to fix their age-old problems, but also providing the platform to tackle service management challenges that have been perceived until recently as too complex to realistically address with software.

ServiceNow believes that an organisation regardless of size or complexity requires a "single system of record" for all processes being used to acquire, deploy, manage, assess and retire business services and the underlying infrastructure upon which an organisation depends. Effective IT service management is all about implementing process with as much automation as possible, remaining flexible to your business requirements and responding to reporting and workflow needs.

Inclined to build a profession as ServiceNow Developer? Then here is the blog post on, explore ServiceNow Training

ServiceNow Architecture

The ServiceNow platform as a service is 100% designed and developed by internal development staff, under the direction of CPO, Fred Luddy and VP of Development, David Osman. It is a Java-based platform using a Tomcat Web server and running on Linux. Generally speaking, most customers run on a MySQL database although some customers are running on Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and Sybase.

Dedicated Database and Application Set

• Elevated customer security
• Customer data is not mixed with other customers.
• Faster application response times
• Greater scalability
• Extensive application customisation preserved through the upgrade

 

ServiceNow Interview Questions

 

Deliver ServiceNow

Manage business processes from start to finish with integrated solutions for:

Asset and Configuration: identify and monitor IT service assets and their relationships.

Planning and Policy: define IT strategies and manage projects.

IT Services: deliver IT services and support to business users.

IT Operations Management: track and manage IT resources and systems.

Non-IT Services: automate business processes outside of IT.

Developing with Servicenow

This bridge uses the SOAP API to make calls to Service Now so that the desired information can be retrieved. Here is a quick primer on how to retreive your data from Servicenow.

A list of standard tables can be found on the Servicenow wiki (here).

The table name is what needs to be inputted as the structure to get data from that particular class

Another place to find table names is under the System Definition header there is a Tables table that lists all of the tables, including both the names and labels

Keep in mind that all custom tables will have 'u_' appended onto the beginning of the name

A list of fields can be found a couple of different ways

Go to the Tables table located under System Definition and click on the name of the table you want to find the fields for. This will pull up a list of field labels. To find the name just click on a field and look in the Column Name input box.

The other way to find out the field names for a table is to look at the WSDL. This will give you a list of all the names in XML format. To find that just go to the url with the form <instance>.service-now.com/<table_name>.do?WSDL. A list of fields can be found under many of the elements (getResults, getResponse, getRecords, etc).

Make sure that you are using the field name and not the field label when building qualifications. (Hint: If there is a space in the field you are trying to use, you are likely using the field label.

Qualifications for the Service Now follow the form of "Field"="parameter_value", so if the field or parameter value have double quotes they will need to be escaped.

The query string in the qualification mapping will be "Attribute"="<%=parameter["Attribute"]%>"