ServiceNow

On May 9th, I started a new career. This wasn’t something I had planned.  I’ve been the VP/CIO of Information Services for my former company for a decade.  Before that I ran various technical teams for various companies.  I’ve always been in a technical senior leadership role since graduating college and getting my first “real job” with Cincinnati Bell Telephone where I had the pleasure of building an Internet Service Provider (Fuse Internet Access) and then a Broadband ADSL network (ZoomTown.com). Earlier this year I left my former employer due to various changes that were occurring within the company and what I saw as my potential future there.  That change required me to re-evaluate my...

I’m a big ServiceNow fan.  I became a bigger fan when they opened up a new Developer Program that included access to a free, personal ServiceNow Instance.  Just go to that link, register, and then ask for your Developer Instance. Having a personal instance is amazing, because “back in the day” you’d have to request access to a shared demo Instance.  The problem with these is that they were often used as sandboxes by lots of other people, completely wrecking your ability to test ideas or see how something would react.  If you wanted to see an out-of-box Instance and compare to yours, you were hosed, these always had modifications to them. Now you don’t have to...

The Problem A few days ago, we started having strange behavior in our Configuration Management Database (CMDB).  When looking at certain classes of Configuration Items (CI) we would see the User Interface (UI) display repeated buttons, and there were no CIs in the List View.  Additionally, if you went to the Tables & Columns module and tried to delete all records from cmdb_ci_netgear, the UI would report that the table was already empty (but it wasn’t): Worse still, none of the New or Edit… buttons worked on this List View any longer. The Investigation Our partner talked internally, and found another consultant who had seen this behavior previously, he informed us that it occurs within CMDB List...

Today marks another milestone in my professional career.  I’m going to begin writing blog posts about a great new Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) tool called ServiceNow.  We recently contracted with ServiceNow at my employer and I’m thoroughly impressed with the solution.  I’m so impressed that I’ve decided to pursue my certification in various aspects of the ServiceNow solution and have now completed my ServiceNow System Administrator training (in preparation for my Certified System Administrator). This first article is going to be about a solution that I implemented while in my System Administrator training:  Notification of Impersonation Events. What is an Impersonation Event?  ServiceNow provides the ability for someone with the admin role to impersonate another...