welcome back to another episode of titans of now titans reaches a wide audience of servicenow admins developers architects and product owners so if you want your brand in front of this audience check out the description below for how to contact me about sponsorship opportunities if you want to know what i'm up to lately i invite you to discover vivid charts vivid charts is a visualization and storytelling platform built on servicenow stop exporting data off platform to get the aesthetic control and storytelling experiences that you want hey everyone welcome back to another titans of now it is so good to have you here i'm proud to have another titan from the largest democracy in the world the great nation of india this is the first titans i'm doing where i don't actually know the titan personally but let me assure you this man is a mega titan he's a top performer in the servicenow community and absolutely omnipresent on social media and he's also in that wave of servicenow resources migrating to youtube ladies and gentlemen alakuti ali welcome to the show hey robot thank you thanks for having me here yeah the pleasure is mine as always we start at the start why don't you tell me how you got your start in the servicenow space sure so before coming into service now i used to work with the legacy itsm tools and process i was from the java background and i had some understanding on web development almost six years back when my customer decided to transition to service now i started my journey i think it was during the dublin release i started learning service now it was a great time back then yep and how would people know you in the servicenow community what are you famous for i've been active in the community for past four years and i was also the part of the mvp program for last three years so mostly i've been known in the name of mvp and a lot of people often contact me with their issues so i do help them out also in this current knowledge i had taken a couple of sessions which had given me some more exposure you hosted sessions at knowledge yeah the last knowledge knowledge20 that's awesome what sessions did you host i took one session on the best practices and another session on mobile app development so you got two in one knowledge right yeah that's awesome i'm glad to hear it for those on the call we will have links to those in the description below so please be sure to check those after the show i've seen you answering questions and i've seen your post you cover a broad spectrum of things on servicenow but what parts of the platform do you most enjoy working with or resonate the most to i have worked in itsm itbm hrsd item and items pay specifically with software asset management of all of these products i have been very much attracted to discovery you could literally scan any active devices with your infrastructure using discovery and the pattern designer any company going for itsm should think twice on whether they should go for item first or the itsm a strong cmdb lays the foundation to your instance and the item space has a set of powerful products that can automate your cmdb and when used together with your itsm it forms a deadly combination to keep your ip and infrastructure running and up to date so discovery is one of my favorite products of all i gotta admit this is the first time in as many years as i've been doing this that somebody said discovery is their favorite tell me more about that because i'm not a discovery expert by any stretch of the imagination but it always seems to me that people over discover at the start and it confuses later parts of the implementation because how do you wield a cmdb that's got like seven million discovered things in it do you have any wisdom you can share on that topic definitely initially i i was also under the impression that discovery was complicated not in my reach but when i started working with it i realized the actual value of this product so you could definitely discover a whole lot of your infrastructure but if you are going to start a project the main focus should be your core devices your core servers core computers or any related devices you don't have to focus on your entire infrastructure the ones which are your critical devices that should be your primary focus and the product itself has been set up in such a way that you could easily configure the different devices and discover them how hard is it in discovery to scale everything back and tread carefully because i get the impression that it's easy to just put discovery on hit the go button and just discover everything how difficult is it to just scale that back to discover just the things you need basically you need to have a clear understanding of the customer infrastructure the part of service now is very simple the most time consuming is part is to understand the infrastructure so you need to have a good support of the customer network team in order for a discovery project to be successful and the network team would have a clear understanding on the actual critical devices which they can share the corresponding ip ranges or the subnets and is that the secret to be super careful and narrow on the ip ranges or is there any way to turn discoverable entities on and off meaning i have no interest in discovering the processes running on these machines i just want to discover the machines of this class is that possible that's definitely possible normally discovery uses an iterative approach you cannot get all the devices discovered in a single time so you would have an iterative approach for the first focus would be on the major critical devices the second focus would be on your secondary devices like the printers or the scanners and all so you can set priority on that and being a discovery guru you must have a lot of tight relationships with people that are running the cmdb right yep i do i do have are they often the same person or is there a differentiation and skill set that you'd want to have a configuration manager is not your discovery person ideally it would be a better scenario if we get the same person to manage both because they have the knowledge of the infrastructure the attributes of different devices and they would be the best person to you know manage the cmdb assets what do you think the most common errors in approaching discovery are it would be the requirement gathering phase itself so there would be a set of common errors that you would get while discovering devices the main thing would be access issues or your firewall issue if your firewall is completely open or if the infrastructure is providing complete access to all devices then you won't face any kind of issues later during discovery so initially during the requirement workshops as servicenow consultants we should be clear with the requirements to access the infrastructure once we are cleared on this we won't face any issues and during the discovery so i'll run a scenario past you i had a customer that was kind of a call me as you need me customer and we'd always have discussions about the cmdb and they just wanted to discover as much as they could and my warning was always nope you gotta have like real specific business use cases for what you discover both in terms of class and in terms of properties right um that's true right and maybe you need to know what versions all the servers are for compliance reasons not just for the curiosity element of it but i feel like there's an unmet or an unchallenged need people want to know like what's out there what is mine and out there and everything about it because they can't see it this is all very abstract right what do you say to those customers that just they want to discover everything because they imagine it feels an unknown for them yeah that's one of the primary reason that you would be doing discovery because you are already paying cost for all the infrastructure mostly customers do want to get a complete knowledge of the infrastructure and if you are discovering almost all the devices it would give you understanding on which devices you exactly need and which you don't need and you can save the post on those devices which you not at all require so that is one of the major benefit of it additionally it's not just discovering the devices once you discover devices you can expand over it you know you can use the same thing for example let's see you are also adding the service maps which would give you an expanded view of your application services along with infrastructure it's kind of a combination which would definitely help with your itsm process as well you're suggesting that it is a valid desire to discover the whole of one's environment but just to do it iteratively so you're not getting seven million in in like one shot yeah exactly you should go iterative the first with the critical devices than the others which are of slower priority but it would be an advantage to cost saving if you discover the complete infrastructure so does the market still have that dynamic where there's multiple discoveries and you got to reconcile them all into the servicenow reconcile is still an option you have sccm which is a desktop-based scanning tool so if you're using sccm with discovery definitely you would have to reconcile one of them there are also additional external tools which are used for discovering devices and how is servicenow for doing the records setting up the reconciliation uh servicenow has its own ui for that you have the reconciliation definitions where you can decide which should be the priority one you also have the ability to you know to do it at the attribute level so it's good with that all right we're gonna leave the cmdb discussion a little bit and again we narrowed in on that because it's your favorite place to be but you do have quite a number of domain expertise on the platform how did you manage to get so wide a knowledge base on servicenow so it's been like almost 60 years i've been working in servicenow initial focus was always the itsm i've worked on couple of itsm projects then i had a major project in hrst which was one of my biggest project i've also worked recently with software asset management which is a very good knowledge that i've been learning so much and yeah so it's basically the different projects that i'm getting from different modules has helped me to cover all these vast areas so it's just getting in harm's way and getting those projects in order to gain the expertise yep what do you what do you do to prep for a project like if they just tell you hey you're gonna do hr but you've never done an hr implementation what's your path to getting credible in enough time it's really difficult you know the project time would be you know it gets quickly started recently i've just started working on a software asset management project and my studies also continue site-wise you will have the requirement gathering on one side on the other side i would be preparing myself for software asset management the now learning site is having a lot of content associated with each and every modules i prefer to start with that it's vast and there are lots of topics with it after that i do check the documentation sites of service now the official one that is also really helpful to start with and then a community where you have lots of blogs articles written by different exports of the itam community that's also really helpful for it okay thanks for thanks for sharing your learning strategy with the community now i want to talk about like six years is a long time to be in the space you must have slain some real dragons but slaying the dragons means contending with the dragons those really hard moments where you're like god am i gonna make it could you articulate a story about the hardest time you had in the servicenow space and what got you through it i do have many i do remember a situation when i was stuck with a technical requirement we had a new implementation project to go live where the customer had set up several sso providers in the instance as we know it's a service now limitation that you can only have a single sso with auto redirection so all the sso need to have a two redirection which was not possible in service now this was kind of a tough situation for me because the blue light was approaching and and it was an important requirement for the customer after lots of research i got a solution to set up three custom urls using the old processor approach if you remember the processors which helped me to enable auto redirection to the ssos you know sometimes the old configurations become too handy for us and you know saves your tea and so the customer readily accepted that despite it being kind of a legacy solution yeah the customer had to because it's a tool limitation platform limitation so there was no other way to overcome that how long did it take you it almost took some time to research on it we had a couple of you know high ticket trees initially i went through the community searched a lot and i think almost two to three weeks to get this out and conversely what would you say is the accomplishment you're most proud of in the space i did mention one hr project that i work it was one of my biggest project almost it lasted for an year it was a big project and it covered almost all the products of hr including case management knowledge employee documents management the inbuilt hr integration module external chatbots and the major part was a complex and a dynamic portal that gave me a lots of hands-on with the angularjs the bootstrap and css this was a big learning opportunity for me and it was one of the best project that i've worked till now sounds like they threw the kitchen sink at you yeah if you could change anything about either the product or the ecosystem what would that be i do appreciate all the changes that are introduced to improve the developer experience one change that i would like to have is related to the catalog item development at many times we do get requirements from customer to build a lot of catalog items sometimes they would say 150 new items sometimes 100 mostly these items share a common design so i would like to change the way in which we create catalog items today like when i create a new item i need to be presented with a list of templates to choose from a more of kind of ui friendly configurations where i select my template i add my variables and when i click create it's completely create my catalog item i have also seen cases where the developers uses excel template to load and create lots of catalog item so if we could simplify this it would save a lot of effort for the developers all right we're approaching time we have a lot of freshers watch the titans of servicenow series what would you say to somebody who's just getting their feet wet in servicenow okay so i really have something here if you have noted there is a huge demand for service now in the market now and if you watch the recent questions which are posted in community you could see a different pattern of questions comparing with two to three years back people just copy their customer stories or their issues and paste them directly into a post you could also see big scripts of 100 lines being posted into the community the main problem is they are not willing to put a minimum effort to understand it or to debug the script it would be tough initially but comparing with the past years that i have seen there are lots of learning content available in the internet and also in the community they should put some time to practice learn the basics understand the best practices and proceed this will definitely help anyone who's preparing their career in service now and this is some advice that i have to give to them wise words well ali thank you so much for joining me i know it's crazy pain to get our time zones aligned but really appreciate you being on the show with me thank you robot it was nice talking with you if you'd like to sponsor this channel's content email me at the address pictured here if you need a conversation on where your servicenow implementation is or where it's going you can reach me on super peers and book a short consult if you want to contribute to high quality high frequency output consider a donation if not i still appreciate your viewership consider hitting the like button and sharing within your network thanks for watching