Day 1

Prerequisites

The sysadmin course assumes you understand the material in the foundations course, which is available free online: Foundations Course Materials(external link)

Applications Overview

• ServiceNow is a suite of applications. Someone with the sysadmin role can add/remove apps from the baseline instance.
• The baseline product includes almost everything except the MID Server product (Discovery & Runbook Automation).
• The architecture is apache/tomcat/mysql.
• Some customers host on-premises and use Oracle, but this is the exception rather than the rule.

Does Yale want to use the old or the new (2011) interface? Do we allow users to choose, or force one?
Will Yale use Social IT?
Should we attempt to partially integrate/sync Social IT with existing Yammer network?

Other Sources of SN Information

• SN Gurus – unofficial, though it's run by SN employees.
• SNAUG – user group.
• JJA blog – a power user w/ a SN-specific blog.

Important Takeaways

"When in doubt, right-click."--context menus rule in SN.
Scroll down--pagination is used inconsistently, sometime content doesn't completely fit into the visible part of the frame.

Core Concepts

• sys-id - GUID behind each SN record. This allows you to, for instance, modify the number field of an incident record, since it's not the key field. Also might mean that moving/syncing records between instances could be tricky.
• sys_user - DB table containing user records, one record per user.
• by default, the "Go to" search dialog (present when there is a list) is a begin search. You can make it a contains search by prefixing the search term with an asterisk.
• possible to Update All records by selecting this option in the list header context menu (e.g., assign all open tickets to the Network group... even tickets not on the current page).

Other Goodies

• "splits" control tab order
• the option to "Insert" is not always present and may have to be added via UI Actions
• "Insert" only shows up for existing or saved records... so if you don't see it, you may have to save first. This prevents sequence number waste.

How will Yale set default list columns? These can be set by admin and personalized by users.
How does Yale plan to use instances, migrate configurations, and refresh data?
Will Yale change the default color scheme away from Red/Green (since 7-10% of the male population can't tell the difference)?
For some users we may want to install non-SSO users for when/if LDAP goes down.

Roles, KB

• mapping roles to groups (not users) is best practice
• KB articles can be made available by role
• articles can be direct-d/l attachments
• KB feedback foes to flagged articles/ratings under KB menu... not email.
• KB search button can be disabled (knowledge-search=false in dictionary entry... use case??)

KB Gotchas

• valid-to date determines show/hide
• workflow status... default is draft (not visible)

How will Yale design, delineate & assign roles in the tool pursuant to ITIL and best practice?
Do we make a concerted effort to move KB-like articles out of Confluence, SharePoint, etc and standardize on SN?
Engage documentation folks to decide how KB should look (i.e. icons, categories, templates, who sees what)

Day 2

DB Tables & Data Dictionary

Tables Overview

• System Dictionary (sys_dictionary)
• Field Labels (sys_documentation)
• Table Classes (sys_db_object)

Tips

• direct navigation to any DB table: in "Filter Text" you can type table.list to go right to list of tables, e.g. incident.list or change_request.list. Use CAPS and it pops it into a new window or tab.
• once you activate a plugin, you can't uninstall it... you can only disable it.

In general, personalize forms instead of the data dictionary.

Which regex flavor is used/which features are supported? Assuming it's java under the hood but not sure how it's filtered or augmented. PCRE meta/control is apparently not supported.

Reports

News Gauge. Replace/integrate w/ ITS status page?
For performance reasons, should we remove/fix refresh rate con for widget/gauges/news. See Homepage Admin app.
Should we restrict self-service report/metric creation? Heard that unless you allow, it's a lot of work for one person.

CMDB & Import Sets

• Tables (major)
  • cmdb_ci (attributes)
  • _cmdb_rel_ci (relationships)
• XML-based Excel imports unsupported. Only binary xls (pre-2003)
• Clean up your data prior to import. Cleaning up afterwards is not fun.
• Don't do imports during busy hours.

Best practice to use "import" in all import set names since this is used when naming the underlying table
Matching records always get updated/overwritten. Last update wins! Clean up existing records prior to import if this is a concern (though it won't overwrite with an empty/null from the import set)

Service Catalog

Do we want to customize text for "More Information" drop-down in Create New dialog/Record Producer categories?
How will we organize SC... internal & external offerings, what groups?
Who will design the SC workflow? Talk to community for best practice guidance.

SLA

• use SLAs to motivate employees to compete/improve
• "retroactive start" aligns SLA clock w/ incident history
• clock or schedule-based SLA definitions possible

Will Yale use allow pause SLAs w/ discretion or disallow?
Where possible, link email to underpinning contract provider help desk ingest in the SLA workflow? (just an idea)

Day 3

UI Policy for Forms

• vis/hide
• edit/ro
• optional/mandatory

UI Action

• buttons/links/context menu (form or list)
• can be custom-scripted
• server-side or client-side dynamism

a lot of stuff can be acessed from multiple places in the Application Navigator

Business Rules

• server-side JS, applied per interaction
• client-callable (triggerable AJAX)
• global (applies to every interaction)

Will Yale apply best practice of changing the overall color scheme of different environments/instances to avoid mistakes & confusion?
Are vanity domain names & reverse proxying/lb required for Yale? What will be the URL?

Update Sets

• As in config dev->test->prod
• Things not included in update sets:
  • new records
  • new users/groups
  • modified CIs
  • schedules
  • homepages (these can be manually included)
  • unpublished workflows

Never touch baseline or default Update Sets
Find sweet spot. Don't bundle too many or too few changes in an update set. Make it manageable.
Don't delete update sets! Can't undo, erases record of who made change, customizations can be blown away since system is no longer tracking deleted changes.

• option to clone instances via a request to SN support

What is Yale's migration plan/path?
What is planned for establishing communication plan b/w dev & ops?

Security/ACLs

• An ACE is verified when:
  • all conditions evaluate to true
  • script in script field returns true or sets variable 'answer' to true
  • user has one of the roles specified in the req'd roles

Will Yale put a ceiling on attachment size?
Will Yale limit attachment type/extensions?
Does email ingest attachments and honor the above limitations? (instructor didn't know)
Will Yale allow sub/unsub to notifications?

HI is the SN helpdesk. Available officially after we go live and VAR (Fruition) cuts the cord.
unrelated UI pro tip - shift-select can grab a column