Certified Implementation Specialist: Service Mapping exam personal experience

[Nailia]

Among all of the ServiceNow products I was always finding the Orchestration, Discovery and Event Management to be the most fascinating and having great potential of bringing actual financial value to customer, while still being quite expensive. However, none of the customers I was supporting at a time had those present in the instances.

Past spring I got a great opportunity to go through the video presentation of the solution and decided that I want to learn more. I have spent quite some time watching the sales videos related to the Service Mapping, and realized that perhaps I need to go for an exam just to check how well do I orient in the subject without having a hands  on experience.

After that, the news came about the course being a mandatory prerequisite for taking the certification - and I was triggered, as unfortunately I was not in the position of ordering a course for myself at a time. So I went ahead and scheduled the exam to 1st of July, being the last day of passing the exam without a course, thinking that if I would fail, I still will be able to re certify without taking the course.

Long story short, I did fail for the first attempt, and now, after finally passing the exam successfully, I think I have some ideas on how would I recommend studying for the exam if somehow you have a situation that you have to pass the exam without a course:

1. Have an environment where you can click through the whole content of Discovery, Event Management, Service Mapping modules. It is crucial, as there is a strong emphasis on your hands on knowledge. You have to know how to activate certain features, what are the types of the certain questionnaire fields on - go through it all!

2. Do not forget the CMDB module while preparation! There are quite a few questions that you will easily answer only if you have a proper knowledge of CMDB tables architecture, the common operations with the records int eh tables, hierarchy, etc.

3. Identification rules, Reconciliation rules, Precedence rules. Make sure you understand how they work and use them in your preparation instance.

4. Make sure you study thoroughly the way the patterns work. Not only it will help you with troubleshooting in your regular work,     it will also be helpful on the exam itself as the BluePrint of the exam states

5. As the BluePrint suggests as well, topic of benefits of Event Management, Service Mapping will be questioned. I have found that the most information about the benefits of the applications ServiceNow presents not within the documentation, but on the main webpage:

Overall, I definitely can feel that if I would have the opportunity to take the course, it would have been much less stressful, but I must say, that having to study all myself, I have learnt a lot and I am very excited to apply my knowledge further. 

Helpful links:

Exam (CIS SM) blueprint: https://www.servicenow.com/content/dam/servicenow/other-documents/training/cis-sm-blueprint.pdf

Docs: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/kingston-it-operations-management/page/product/it-operations-management/reference/r_ITOMApplications.html

Presentation materials: https://www.servicenow.com/products/it-operations-management.html

[Amit Sharma4]

Hi Nailia, 

Thanks for this nice article. I have been working on Discovery and Service Mapping for about 3 years now and interested in CIS-SM certificate. The documentation link is really a good link to get knowledge about Discovery, Mapping  and event management.

But in addition, i am looking for some practice questions for the exam. Do you have any idea where i can find some?

Thanks for your time..

Amit