CMDB searching in the Service Now Platform is underwhelming when compared to many other platforms

JGwyther
Tera Contributor

First, I want to describe why this is important.  Imagine that you are a new help desk analyst at a major company that supports hundreds of applications.  End-Users generally do not know the application (CI name) they know what they are attempting to do.  For example:  In our tire purchasing application CI name: B2B purchase funnel or DRSG or  Online Tire Stores; customers can search for tires in a verity of ways, they can "Search by Size", "Search by SKU", or "Search by Vehicle". etc .

 

Now imagine there is a remote help desk (we are 100% remote) person on their 1st day.  A customer calls in and states "I cannot search by size".  How is the help desk person supposed to fill in the CI?  They will not be able to put "search by size" into the CI and have the search return the CIs that have this keyword/phrase associated with it.  This is functionality that the last 2 service applications had OOB.  For some reason Service Now only searches on CI Name and does not allow this type of searching without significant development (based on what our implementor is telling me).   I cannot use "TAGS" without going to the full grid, which is doable, unless I want to have the same capability on an end user record producer.  Either way displaying the full grid of CI's (over 30,000) vs a short list returned from a keyword/phase search is inefficient and time consuming. 

 

Has anyone developed an advanced CI search that works from a single field, looking for keywords in either the description or matching tags?  I really do not care which.  

 

This is what I want the user to be able to do and get a list of applications with this functionality

JGwyther_0-1727199157721.png

 

VS hitting the "magnifying glass" then filtering on description (or by tag) that contains "Search By Size" in order to get a list of qualifying CIs

 

JGwyther_1-1727199371915.png

This is important if the Help Desk cannot resolve the issue.  Why, because we escalate incidents to the support team listed on the CI.  If the helpdesk cannot find the CI or chooses the incorrect CI then the ticket goes on what I call the Hamster Wheel - delaying resolution for the customer. 

 

Does anyone know how to resolve this. It is a significant loss of functionality from our previous 2 service desk applications.  

 

I appreciate any help on how to design a keyword search into the main incident form.

 

 

 

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

Brad Bowman
Kilo Patron
Kilo Patron

In the typeahead search like you have pictured you can add columns and search on them - to some extent.  This is an easy configuration change, not a customization.  The problem with what you've laid out is that the Description field - being a multi-line text - is too long, and tags are records on a different table, so that's a whole other issue.  But this is what it would look like if you were to populate certain words or phrases in a string field - one that's unused on the cmdb_ci table, or create a new custom field.  As seen in Dark mode, which makes everything look better:

BradBowman_0-1727202988883.png

This also includes the sys_class_name (Computer) which you could get rid of.  If I were to continue typing ' size' the results would be limited to just the first 2 records.  

 

 

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Thanks for your help with this Brad.  

You are welcome!