DevOps for Global Scope

[Community Alums]

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for insights and experiences on how to improve our way of developing to be more aligned with the DevOps philosophy. The majority of our team is still working with update sets while a part of the team (CMDB) started their development with the Azure DevOps integration. That proved to be a great way of working but we are struggling to expand it to the more core ITSM stuff that we are building/changing. 

It is quite clear that CMDB can have multiple applications:

• Global application for commonalities
• Scoped applications for specific integrations

We are struggling to translate this to the general parts of the platform (change management, case management, incident management, SLAs, ACLs etc.)?

Should we have:

1. multiple global applications with pipelines where we capture those changes? 
2. One global application for all core ITSM things? I see challenges with multiple people working on it.

From what I read I see a big push from ServiceNow towards a more DevOps way of working rather than sticking with update sets but there is little guidance on this topic. An additional issue is that you cannot work on everything from Studio which complicates capturing certain updates.

What are your experiences working with DevOps in ServiceNow? How do you organize your applications? I would love to start a discussion to see what the community is doing on this topic or what ServiceNow currently recommends.

[Community Alums]

Hey Evan,

I plan to experiment with having multiple global-scoped applications for handling different parts of the Global scope but I am also thinking that this can cause issues on multiple fronts. One of many is the one you mention with the upgrade plans. 

I also thought of many custom ideas on how to do this but if it is not aligned with the ServiceNow roadmap I'm afraid it will just cause a lot of overhead and maintenance. 

There doesn't seem to be a lot of documentation on this topic. Is it wrong to assume that then most people work within the global scope with update sets? 

What is your go-to way of working to negate some of the drawbacks of using update sets? We use a custom planning/scrum application but otherwise, we just transfer update sets as usual. The documentation part is decent (we can connect update sets to work items) but we are missing CD/CI, code reviews and ATF (+ potentially some other things).

[Evan Miller]

Hi Jan,

We are unfortunately in basically the same boat as you right now. We handle things very similarly. We do have a robust ATF program, but we haven't tied it into a CI/CD pipeline yet. We have been focusing more on process right now than the tools but I'm really interested in hearing how others do this from a tools perspective in ServiceNow.

[Evan Miller]

Hi David, thank you, but I don't think this is what Jan was looking for. I know it's definitely not what I am looking for. These recommendations are too high level and don't really answer the questions around what the actual pipelines should look like.

[Miguel Donayre · Accepted solution]

That white paper is outdated. I have attached the new one that explains and expands in greater detail. 

I also attached one that goes over developing in the Global Scope.

Development Deployment Management on SN has many moving parts, so it is hard to say one size fits all. 

It might not answer your question. Hopefully, it provides more context to help come up with a solution. 

[Community Alums]

Hi Miguel, thank you for the white papers. I found the first one in the meantime but the second one is very useful!

I also found this post which addressed some of my questions and could be useful for someone wondering the same things as me. I know there is no one-size fits all but going through these resources gave me the confidence that we are going in the right direction. We'll run some experiments and see how it goes.