SnowMirror experience?

[lbuttars]

Does anyone have experience with the SnowMirror product? Looking at various methods for extracting data from ServiceNow.

[Marc A Love]

I've downloaded/installed the demo and honestly am quite impressed with it....waiting for a project I can add this to the budget for...I really like the idea of local reporting (with tools of choice)...and SNOWMirror was extremely easy to setup and get running...Pavel (the developer) was also very easy to get hold of with the few questions I had...if you have any specific questions...I'll try and answer....

[cwjurges]

Hey Marc,

I urge you to take a peek at what the ServiceNow co-founder has developed at Perspectium. The platform allows for very low impact to ServiceNow because there is no incoming web services connections. You can configure it to publish once and subscribe everywhere. The output is extremely fast as well.

Hope that helps.

Chris

[pauluksteam]

Hi Lance,

I can now offer you the benefit of my experience with SnowMirror, which I tested in various forms and have now delivered as a a production solution for our heavily customised SN instance.

SnowMirror was easy to install and upgrade throughout the test period, and easy to configure in Production.

Some issues were found during the testing period, but Pavel Muller and the developers at SnowMirror were very attentive and provided fixes to the more important issues very quickly. The product is more stable and mature at the point we entered production than it was when we started.

We started testing the Standard product, with the ambitious aim of replicating our entire Service-Now database (all tables) to an on-site MySQL database. We had very basic computing resources and storage available (i.e. a Windows 7 desktop), which I found capable of both running SnowMirror and the MySQL database it was replicating to. A full copy was achieved, although the initial synchronisations (Clean and Sync) could run for a long time (our task table has nearly 3 million rows). Whilst the process was time-consuming, the fact that it was possible using the very basic technical environment we had available is a credit to the SnowMirror tool.

Once the initial synchronisations were complete, the ongoing delta replications were generally reliable and straightforward. It needed very little attention, and I successfully accelerated synchronisation schedules to hourly for our most critical tables. This simply isn't practical with the ODBC driver (our only other alternative at the time).

Our second stage testing, and alternative use-case was the synchronisation of important CMDB and Service Management tables to a SQL Server database for reporting purposes. We used the Enterprise edition of SnowMirror for this and found it to be stable and reliable on the hardware available. Again, some defects were identified but quickly rectified.

Using ODBC, with a bespoke synchronisation solution that took us months to develop, we could not achieve stable synchronisations of around 180 tables, with the most frequent tables being up to 3 hours out-of-date. By comparison, SnowMirror is now allowing us to maintain 370+ tables, with the most important replicated hourly.

Impact of our Service-Now instance is undetectable. I'm sure there must be some, but we haven't found any!

The Server (Windows Server 2012) we are running our production instance of SnowMirror on, also runs Service-Now MID-Server instances and SnowMirror has had minimal impact on the operation of the MID-Server instances. We did have to increase the Memory allocation in Tomcat for the JVM, to overcome an issue with one table with particularly large fields, so the memory usage is higher than what a standard SnowMirror installation would be.

The most painful aspect of SnowMirror is the time taken for a Clean and Sync - which would need doing after a major upgrade or clone over the source SN instance. This is very rare, but because SnowMirror only runs 3 synchronisations concurrently, it means the initial data load can take days to complete. However this is offset by the efficiency and reliability of the delta replication (standard synchronisation) process.

Another issue we had with ODBC was the ability to delete rows on our copy. This needs either a full re-load of the copy table, or bespoke jobs to use sys_audit_delete table. SnowMirror does this seamlessly and reliably, ensuring that the on-site copy is more representative of the Service-Now instance data.

Another enhancement that was introduced during our trial period was the ability to include Display Value (DV) columns in the copied table. This reduces the need to know the ServiceNow table structures and the number of joins necessary to read the data.

The only remaining negative aspect is the inability to preserve indexes on the tables in the copy DB, or automatically generate indexes that would be present in the SN instance. We've addressed this with a scheduled stored procedure to re-add indexes periodically, but SnowMirror do have this as an enhancement request, so it may be addressed soon.

Hope this helps,

Regards,

Paul

[Mauricio Araujo]

Hi,

I have a question: is this a paid app? Does it require licensing? Because the ServiceNow Store says it's free.

Thanks,