in this episode of titans of ServiceNow we interview Mark Scott ServiceNow developer MVP and content creator plenty of links in the description below so be sure to check that out remember the end goal of titans of now is an interview with the man himself Fred bloody but I can't do it alone if you enjoy this content please introduce it to your network if you want know what I'm up to lately I invite you to check out vivid charts and stop exporting data off the platform for reporting hey everyone welcome back to another episode of titans of now as always I'm your host Robert fedora today I have a real treat I have Mark Scott super prolific on social media new to ServiceNow live streaming service now content creator extraordinaire and newly minted developer MVP mark welcome to the show hey everybody thanks for having me so the reason I have mark on the show is that ServiceNow has recently rolled out a program called developer MVP this is different from community MVP and it's for people that are prodigious in providing service now content that's good for developers so if you need to follow mark and I'm gonna assume that you do need to follow mark check down in the description below we got all kinds of contact information and places where you can consume his content so mark we always start at the start tell us how you got your start with ServiceNow funny story actually ServiceNow was nowhere even near my career path I'm working for a MSP we're an implementer and before we were implementing service now we're actually custom software development eventually our IT operations center our network team decided that they needed to have a robust ticketing solution a bunch of stakeholders went out in did some research and ServiceNow came up as the number one we implemented it internally really loved it and decided that we would start offering that up to our clients and so I kind of got baptized by fire into the service now go learn this and here's your first project and how long ago was that that was about three years now Wow three years don't let the short amount of time fool you folks mark is super legit if you follow him on Twitter you'll know exactly what I mean and actually I got a thank you mark because I was at a customer and they wanted me to establish some guidelines for them for mid server deployment beyond just what ServiceNow gives you on their doc site right and so mark was glad enough to jump on the horn with me and after about an hour we had squared away a bunch of other reasons you may want to deploy a mid server that was super helpful for me and we really should maybe collaborate on a video about that or something oh absolutely yeah that sounds great yeah but you are kind of at least in my realm known as the kind of the mid server wizard I feel like you have a lot to say about mid servers yeah you know mid servers they're kind of the the redheaded stepchild of ServiceNow right we kind of deploy them and throw them into our infrastructure and then just let them be and you know they they're very powerful we can do a lot of really cool stuff in the platform with mid servers so I kind of fell in love with them just for their under utilization and their ability to just really break out of the platform and do you know all sorts of really cool stuff what's something really cool that you can only do with the power of a mid server I think that's kind of the misnomer is only with a mid server technically you can load Java code onto a mid server into anything so you can do whatever you want the mid server it really just allows you to crack open that egg that is service now right we don't have access to the you know behind the scenes code of service now we can't really make it alterations to that so anytime that we need to make something really truly custom and really truly intense we can actually load that into the service into the the mid server there and that that's where everything starts to run and and that's really really cool from a mid server standpoint it can do a lot of really fun things again I'm not the I'm not the mid server magician here but sure are you suggesting that like you just load whatever scripts and resources you need onto the mid server and then the ECC queue is your input output - absolutely yeah so what's really fun with that is the ECC queue then becomes kind of your system of record write out all the messages to and from the the ServiceNow instance talk through the ECC queue what's fun is being able to you know kind of take that interaction and you don't have to bring any custom code to make that interaction happen right it just happens out of the platform but you can actually write custom Java code that can be launched down to your your mid server that would then take that ECC queue interaction and leverage it if something comes in from the ECC queue I can execute some code and do some crazy stuff so one of the one of the things that I've done with that is knowledge 19 I gave a presentation about loading machine learning algorithms into the mid server and running those now we have all this machine learning and you know this built into the platform but I was doing like image classification that's not something that we're necessarily doing in the platform we're doing a lot of you know ticket deduplication and just really trying to figure out you know is this a high priority ticket I wanted to do image classification I want to do something that nobody had ever done mm-hmm and now it's pretty easy to do with the mid server that's one area I feel I've always wanted ServiceNow to go but I don't think they've had a good business use case but I started dabbling in environmental health and safety you can get some pretty crazy stuff we used a janitor at an industrial facility walks into a place and scan the environmental information on the barrel he sees in there and then have some system returned back like don't touch this or guess what immediately well and even with the portability of the mid server which is really fun too it's just a Java package so you can load it on a Raspberry Pi you can load it on you know all sorts of things that it never was intended to be on but you know that that really opens up the vetted systems you can throw it on IOT devices you can you can do a lot with the mid server package let's say that I've got anything that runs a full Linux shell right I can obviously install it in a linux shell so you know we see all these prototyping boards these Linux based prototyping boards like you know beagle and all these other ones very easily you could throw a mid server package on that and have a mid server running just on a single board computer so I you know I kind of throw those in the IOT device kind of category it's writing device but you know that's it's connected device so when I think about IOT device I think it devices by that by the thousand yeah and would you can you imagine a situation where you'd have that many mid servers like a mid server on each of those devices doing something practical no but it sounds like fun I was having a conversation with a couple of people on social media about during the mid server in Michael Berrer specifically throwing the the mid server in a docker container right and then having mid servers kind of spin up randomly be able to perform a single task and then spin it back down because I'm not using that computer anymore things like that so where I might not say that they would go on IOT devices I could see an application where there would be thousands of mid servers right I may become agnostic to my mid server I don't care you're gonna spin up you're gonna run one function and then that's the end of your life yes you don't have to worry about the credentials being associated to it or anything anymore you know security obviously if it's not online it can't be accessed your compute obviously goes down because you're not running any background process these things like that RAM utilization any anything and especially in you know virtualized server environment that that's something to think about right I want to put more money towards the things that are making me money I don't want to necessarily be running mid servers that are taking away my CPU right and if you did have a script on the mid server that did shall we say interesting things I mean you would basically assure that that interesting script wasn't accepted accessible except for the instant that mid server sprung up and did its thing and then got decommissioned right absolutely absolutely man this is really cool I think this is the most I talked about mid server since since the last time we talked it's funny you know mid servers just get they I don't know they've got a bad rap it's just you know it's kind of the dusty corner of ServiceNow you know it's it's fun there's a lot that you can do with them yeah well I mean it's got its purpose in ServiceNow right and everybody's like you know it does one or two things that and everybody does it for but beyond that you've really got to be in those creative scenarios in the first place too but yeah I love the fact that guys like you and Michael bar are just out there to you it's just another trick up the sleeve I think of the the mid server is kind of a Swiss Army knife right it may not be designed to do that thing but could I make it sure it can be stretched to the limits there mm-hmm in fact I was in a meeting today where we were talking about potentially packaging mid sir you know pre-installed mid servers with a backup solution that we have so that we could then pull reports from the backup solution hmm let me get your opinion on this back at knowledge 17 was a 17 or eight I think it was I think it was 17 James Neil Tim Attenborough and I and Hugh Nolan did a hackathon where we we did a simulated IOT environment and we basically had a script running every few seconds that would load a ton of information like kind of an IOT data stream yeah into the system and we were pretending that we had smart lights and it was all feeding this information to a co dashboard saying well we know how much luminosity they're putting out we know how much energy they're consuming so therefore we can measure your car footprint and we can measure your electricity cost that's cool enterprise-wide right and then we had this idea that you could drop the dial down like decrease everybody's luminosity by five percent see how that lowers my carbon footprint and cost but I don't think we bridged that gap between I pull the lever and then something's telling the light to go down and our few lumens right is that where you would kind of deploy that like a mid server when you're talking about an architecture like that a lot of the I I would almost say that the stream the the stream that you have from the IOT devices that are you know telling you if they're on or off or whatever actual luminosity is I'd actually handle that in the mid server and then only at the time that I would want to see a report would I actually call out to the mid server to say give me your information right there's there's absolutely no reason that that data has to stream to and from your ServiceNow instance proper you could offload all of that logic to the mid server and then just when a report is run or when data is ready push that through the ECC queue into the ServiceNow instance itself dumb question here where is the data being stored then because I always thought the data's got to be in a database and the mid server I always thought of as like a an execution tool versus a storage tool yes I'm stretching the limits of the mid server with this right the visualization that people should probably have is that yeah you're gonna implement the mid server but you're kind of at the edge of a cliff right you have infinite building capability but if you're not careful right you you can end up following down that cliff very much so with your database question there is no database on the mid server so I'd have to build the database I'd have to have code that goes in and out of the database to store things so now that we're talking it through right I'm like all right yeah the database would be a little complicated but you know we could we could store it locally there's certain technologies like sequel Lite or things like that that'll just store sequel in a single file even really cool but at that point you've broken the egg right you can you can open it up and do whatever you've got to do to build whatever you have now you're gonna lose out on a lot of the cool stuff that ServiceNow offers the database the front-end not having to worry about you know table cleanup primary keys things like that that's all going to become your concern now because you know you're going to architect a solution but man you know seeing seeing people architect solutions like that at the mid server level it would be really really cool for those of you that are kind just starting your ServiceNow journey there's a teachable moment I'm not saying go out and create exotic solutions in whatever domain of service now you like best but what I would say is imagine exotic solutions exactly and if you can get to a point where you can say I can bend the tool in such a way that I could pull it off okay that's where you're gonna do a ton of learning but again it's not about actually doing it because exotic solutions have downsides as well that you always have to consider push the limit of your knowledge to see if you could facilitate an exotic solution absolutely I'll give you a little cautionary tale from my previous experience as a developer I'm one person actually supporting a single application that a client had requested and they put a lot of bandwidth through this application and it goes down every once in a while because like we say it's an exotic solution it was a one-off and now you know a long term over years literally years I have been supporting this product by myself you know it what happens right as an organization if I've got one person that knows this it's not exclusion how do I support that going forward that's just it's just insane right how do I show how do I show a teammate here's what I did you know hope that you're on my level how do i how do I describe it to a junior developer service now is really good about showing a lot of that off right once I've got it in the actual instance itself I can pick through code I can look at things that you know without a whole lot of second-guessing I guess I would say of worrying about if it's gonna go down if you if you build an exotic solution you're tied to that baby and maybe four ears and there's plenty of room to put those on service now in a way that's equally cloaked and veiled yeah which is why I go on rants about accelerators rah-rah us we have all this experience we're gonna deploy something that encompasses 500 things we've learned in the years we've been doing this that's great like 300 of them might be handy to me and then 200 of them are gonna be completely invisible yet active in my instance exactly sorry for the rant no no I think it's good I think it's a good thing to have people challenging these ideas and especially with an accelerator you know I always leery with something that somebody says is going to make my job easier for less money like they're you know there's a reason that we're trains a reason that service now is cloud hosted there's all of these reasons but a lot of people don't really think about but an accelerator is one of those that I'm like I think the personal touch of a human being actually going through and doing evaluation is probably better right how do you know this is better for us and I think so often we have that common practice is confused for best practice everybody does this but what does everybody have to do with the way I deliver services and I'll tell you right now I've done more than my fair share of ServiceNow implementations I have never once deployed an accelerator so now you've got me on the rant now I'm now in wonderfully now I'm sitting here thinking about accelerators a little bit more about how do you know what they're doing you know you're gonna install this giant blob of code into your ServiceNow instance do you know all the little functions that are going to get you know it's crazy right but in there like do people really trust these accelerators that much guy the last accelerator I ever saw it was it was it was a process specific partner the customer of mine deployed it before I got there but I literally said what is the accelerator do we don't know call the vendor get the documentation oh they didn't document it what why I see you peel back the XML and there's like 2000 updates in the XML file Wow and nobody can explain to me what it did look a service now is really good at automating a lot of stuff making a simple outbound rest call is pretty simple I don't know of anywhere in the you know in the logging that if you haven't set it specifically to read all the outbound rest messages how do you know that your accelerator isn't grabbing your data and throwing it back to a database somewhere like I not really great no I'm not making that assumption and I'm not saying anybody's doing that but that's one of those considerations you know as an organization you need to make sure that things that you're supplying are secure the first thing in that is Vance Perrin see a 4,000 line or I'm sorry however many lines that you'd set of XML is not transparency it's comforting to know that somebody with like a three-year tenure in the space can see this plain as day because I think what happens is you like ServiceNow will deploy a new process and thus new process specific vendors come onto the market and they're hiring young devs and you know I mean for the margin it makes a good business sense I'm not faulting them for it but then know these people will be like oh we've learned so much and how can we get our customers to capitalize on our knowledge and so they did they package them up and so at least from my side it's don't attribute to malice what you could to inexperience but I've been in this for 12 years feel like every three years it becomes a thing again so hey I just spent like 15 minutes on mid servers and five minutes on accelerators but I just want to make sure I'm not leaving out the rest of marks guys these are other areas of the ServiceNow platform that you're as passionate about as I think you are about mid servers a service portal right I've dug into service portal a lot I love the way that it's modularized I love the way that it's HTML CSS and JavaScript right you really don't have to have a service now understanding to really get the service portal by total junior developer to go off and make me ten CSS HTML and JavaScript based pages get very easily import those into the service portal to the point where I go just worry about this one widget code is very clean in there there I've seen some questionable widgets but you have the option of taking that code and fixing it right I love the service portal I think it's the future of service now I think it's where everybody needs to start looking and heading it definitely helps you scale your instance it definitely helps non-licensed users interact with the system which is obvious but you know a lot of times we we kind of take that for granted the service portal is a huge tool that I think a lot of people should know about hmm I've never heard somebody talk about it as if it was that new I don't know that I talk about it but it's new I talk about it that it's exciting as a developer I look at the places where I can develop I'm gonna say this word and probably if and some people but let's say proper development write object-oriented classic doesn't development techniques that we don't necessarily get in ServiceNow so writing a script include write is pretty unique to ServiceNow I'm not gonna be able to take that idea and apply it all over the place in development but mid servers with Java packages totally service portal with HTML Javascript and CSS 100% so I see it as the the expansion of the platform I see it as you know infinite opportunity it's that just like the mid server it's it's a little less dramatic of a cliff but you're standing at the precipice of being able to do whatever you want mm-hmm what cool things have you done in service portal then my team and I actually built an entire data center management platform on the service portal so we had a client that was a large data center they had a c-sharp MVC back-end that they were using didn't scale well it was in Azure cloud it wasn't super secure it was secured the way that they wanted it to be and they had already had a ServiceNow instance and they said well can we just move this into here I had the unique qualifications of making c-sharp MVC applications so I was like sure let's look through the code and we actually were able to reverse out a lot of that existing code and put it into the service portal which was a lot of fun and especially for you know people that are publicly facing it's really interesting to have you know a service portal offering for that because a lot of times it's internal to the enterprise right when I have external people and it's not my customer it's my customers customers that puts a huge amount of emphasis on making it right and doing it the right way and that's that's what we did that was awesome I heard you use the term you built the app in service portal I just want to make sure I don't have a too simplified of you but I've always said service portals are kind of like the front end to the back end and so that's kind of like half the solution is my understanding not nuanced enough no no I that's very much so what it can be it doesn't necessarily have to be that though right so when I say that we wrote it in a service portal what we did was we took a service portal first approach right so how am I going to do this in the service portal and then kind of retrofitted the back end to make it work that way it was a little opposite of what we would typically do right so we wanted to be able to report in if I've got an issue with my specific cabinet in a data center that's easy that's an incident and that's that's just the way that that would be handled or you know service requests or things like that but we had some other things that were a lot more interesting for example like you'd said we had pulled in some environmental statistics we had pulled in some utilization of heating and cooling we had pulled in and then had to multi-tenancy like kind of separate all that out so that only people from a certain company could see their company's stuff and then we had some user management right so if I had a user that needed to see this module I needed to grant them permission so what was really fun we kind of had to make our own permission based system so ServiceNow is very role based I don't know how many people have actually really thought about this but rolls are awesome if I wanted to lob a bunch of permissions on to one person but maybe I want to kind of all a cart build the permissions out so maybe they're allowed to submit incidents and view service requests but they're not allowed to query any financial data right so we actually kind of had to turn ServiceNow on its ear and create permissions that they could do and then the the users of those companies were able to piece now give the permissions to their end users hmm it was a weird tiered approach but it was interesting right yeah we couldn't do it with roles it was just we'd have to have an infinite amount of rolls with an infinite amount of combinations we kind of did it more with permissions that's really cool actually funny enough it's a layover from my custom development days and I had a great mentor that taught me kind of the the permission-based design system as opposed to a role based design system which was an interesting thing for those who are listening who aren't quite there yet myself included could you give us like the ten cent version of what's the difference between a role based system and a permissions based system sure so a role based system is going to stay here's a defined set of permissions that I'm going to allow this user to do a permission based system is going to say I am allowed to do X Y and Z's so instead of just globbing a whole group on I allow them to a la carte pick things that they're that they're allowed to do right so it may actually be a role based system you may you can think of it like that I like to say role but versus permission but a role could potentially have multiple permissions inside of it or a permission is just going to be one single action so if you're looking for an analog in ServiceNow the pop-up when you're looking for notifications where you can kind of pick and choose which notifications you want to receive what you don't want to receive yeah it's kind of the perfect analogy for it right I wanted to be able to turn things on and off based on what my user finds more important right and I don't want to just blank it say no submit incidents and read all this stuff and you know do all the out-of-the-box stuff okay so like in a permissions based system it's a lot more coupled to the actual user it is right so each individual user is allowed to pick and choose from a menu of what they're going to be able to do and and normally it's not the user doing it it's a different right do you know obviously assigning those permissions from a security standpoint so a role is just a better way well not better but a role is a way to kind of group permissions together exact acha jh2 distributive you okay that's really cool exactly I mean I learned something today I hope everybody else did too so we got orlando out Parris's on the horizon so with what we've been told or rumors that you've heard what area of service now is future are you most excited about flow designer kind of snuck in a few really interesting integrations for VI CD which andrew barnes has been doing some let's code happy hours based on that have been really really eye-opening for me because I just haven't gotten in that's the the continuous improvement continuous delivery I think it's the continuous delivery cycle of installing scope taps so what the actual CI CD pipeline does in service now is you can literally go out to a repo pull in a scope tap install it in your instance and then run ATF against it to check things all automatically without a human being involved in the process and I think that's just absolutely phenomenal you know what's crazy is like when flow designer first came out I was under the impression like oh this is gonna be the more like democratized work flow builder right the every man's builder but I mean all the talk out there right now is leading-edge stuff that nobody's really considered before now because doing it in work flow wasn't I wouldn't say impossible just like unwieldy I'm sad to see workflow go just because it was something that worked properly in there were gotchas and workflow don't get me wrong if you've ever reinstalled a scoped app in production let me tell you how that doesn't go well the work flow context just get completely screwed up they I mean not screwed up they're deleted they're gone so if you've got a scope tap in production that has currently executing workflows and you reinstall it your workflow has now abruptly ended the biggest benefit I found with the workflows was it's kind of an evil benefit I loved printing the workflows off entire workflows and their their completeness and then presenting them in meetings because that usually ends meetings pretty damn quickly so you know it if I can visually show a project manager I can visually show my executive team exactly you know how complicated something is most people go okay you're right we need to really reduce the scale on this we'll come back to the drawing board on it again right like I'll miss the wire framing aspect of sorry I'll miss the concept of wire framing on workflow I will never miss how unwieldy that was you know like you just never knew where those lines were going this this gets a little hard I guess I'll have to follow this with my cursor yeah I always like highlight the line right right and you know hopefully you're within the middle of a context and you can see okay yeah it executed that but you know there were some times where you know we're in design meetings we're going okay wait where where are we again which which corner of the word are we working in or you get like the screen isn't quite the same size as the workflow screen and so you'd have to like scroll over horizontally twice before he can scroll over vertically once I'll miss it I'll you know I'm I'm jumping on the flow designer bandwagon and getting a lot of awesome things come out of it yeah it's time like I I'm at the point now or it's like I don't try in workflow first I always try and flow design yes yeah and it's interesting in the ServiceNow ecosystem you know again I've only been it for three years right but we have that tipping point right we're like yeah it's been out for six months it's probably time for me to start focusing my attention on whatever that product is all right last question because we're kind of hitting time you have a choice is if you could change anything about ServiceNow change anything about the ecosystem what wouldn't we or if you could do anything with ServiceNow what would it be man I kind of want to answer both independently one of the things I think needs to be changed about the ServiceNow Inc ecosystem is something that service nails are already kind of working on it's the it's the partner system it's been broken for a little while and and especially for msps it's been a struggle my team works on a domain seperated instance and you know you ask someone how much this is gonna cost and ServiceNow and the answer is always ask your sales rep right when your domain separated you have to explain what domain separation is and then ask your sales rep you know nobody who really runs domain separated instances anymore and they really don't know how to price the partner you know when we signed someone on they fixed a lot of that but it really needs to work well needs to work better in my opinion I think we get grease grease some wheels and make the process a lot easier for what I would like to do in ServiceNow I'm always pushing the boundaries actually wrote a app for my wife my wife has epilepsy and a lot of times it's it's hard for her to either you know after a seizure she can't remember to take her medicine so what I would have written into ServiceNow is kind of that reminder function on a workflow that annoys her every once in a while let's take her medicine what I'd like to see is more applications like that write more of those out-of-the-box just weird things that we we've never thought of and we're trying to push the platform beyond its means because I really at the end of the day ServiceNow is it's a front end and a back end and it's hosted in the cloud like whatever you want to do after that is up to you you know how long it's going to take or how much it might cost is another story but you know it's a fairly infinite platform you could build damn near anything you want into so I'm excited to see people that are writing weird stuff into the platform to weird stuff well hopefully what opportunities he says I don't know if they're doing hackathon a k20 or not but if they are yeah yeah let's take a swing Pastor Mark thanks so much for joining me it was short notice but she's super delivered awesome I appreciate it it was it was fun I've always wanted to do one I've always watched them with awesome I appreciate you having me on welcome to the club and listen for everybody out there be sure to check the description we're gonna have all of Mark Scott's social and resources links and you can get all the joy of following mark as well thanks so much mark thank you I have a bite