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 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.

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.

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:

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:

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.

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:

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:

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.

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.

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.

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:

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

As a beginner, you can co-relate the service requests with a web-based form like a movie booking, an exam form and so on, in which you need to enter your details only but depends on required information Service-Now form may be simple or complex. In this recipe, you will learn about the service requests of Service-Now. For better understanding let’s take a better example so if you want a laptop from your organization then on the service request form you might have to choose screen size, ram, hard drive and so on or many organization categories then laptop in the executive laptop, standard laptop, high configuration laptop.

Similar to other enterprise applications, Service-Now also maintains two views. The first is for the end user and another is for admins or ITIL or fulfillers. In this recipe, you will learn about the IT view of the Service-Now application.

Service-Now's Self-Service module is available for all users, whether it's an end user or any ITIL role holder. The self-service application is the best place from to manage major tasks.

Out of the box, Service-Now provides a service desk application from which you can manage all your tasks and your group tasks. To view this application, you should have an ITIL/Fulfiller role that is licensed.

For maintaining the uniqueness of each record Service-Now generates a 32 character global unique ID which is called sys_id. You can view SysID in any standard browser address bar.

Incident management is one of the key applications of Service-Now. As per the ITIL definition, an unplanned interruption to an IT service or reduction in the quality of an IT service is referred to as an incident. Application login error, antivirus error, server room fan and so on can be considered as incidents examples.

Related lists are highly useful when we need to build a relationship between the two tables and for reporting as well, there is always a relationship of parent and child, which can be established by a system definition application (relationship module).

Out of the box, Service-Now provides problem management application for facilitating the problem management process. If we talk about the problem as per ITIL then 'Problem' is the unknown cause of one or more incidents, often identified as a result of multiple similar incidents, In general words if your support team is receiving many incidents related to one CI (Configuration Item) then it is considered as a problem and a problem ticket must be created for permanent fix.

Disraeli, a British prime minister, said that:

So, let's see how Service-Now uses the ITIL framework in its application. Every organization goes through a transition phase to achieve new goals to improve their services, user experiences, stability, or increase their product line for internal or external customers. In the ITIL framework, change management is a process used for managing the planned deployment of alterations to all configuration items in the configuration management database that are a part of production and test UAT environments along with any other environment that a business wants to have under change management. To manage the change management process, Service-Now provides the change management application.

Incident/problem/change may be inter-dependent. Let’s understand this by an example so if your support group has received many incidents INC0000075/ INC0000091/ INC0000059 and so on related to user account which may lead a problem ticket or an emergency change ticket to deploy the permanent fix of issue.  Out of the box, Service-Now provides functions to create a change or problem task from an incident task.