ServiceNow Licenses Fundamentals

[Mark Roethof]

Hi All,

Might there be something like mentioned in the title 🙂
No, seriously. I feel as a techy, that I know very very very litte about licensing.

I don't have to know about the figures and costs, etc.. But, what should I consider when for example building a custom app? Or just setting up some custom tables? What is free? What is not free? When does the user count per role step in? Etc.?

I did saw some threads on the Community, but not a real clear oversight. That some licensing will be involved at some time, okay, fine. But what are best practices while developing to consider unnecessary licensing costs?

Also I saw something like "Platform Real Time" (which can be seen within license counts). What does this mean? When is an App, a custom table, are custom ACL's, considered to be Platform Real Time?

Kind regards,
Mark

[Alberto Consonn]

Hi Mark,

this is an interesting topic to discuss, it's also tricky for me to understand when something is free or not, the ServiceNow guys also redirect the people to speak with the ServiceNow Sales reference.

I would share you here the most important difference in terms of user licences, so the 3 different User Types (Requester, Approver and Fulfiller), the first one is free, the second and third you have to pay a license.

Hope this will help you a bit.

Enjoy 🙂

Please, remember to mark Correct or Helpful if you find my response useful.

Cheers
Alberto

[Mark Roethof · Accepted solution]

Hello Alberto,

Clear chart you shared. Gives insight in - amongst others - the difference between create/read/write/delete.

I did saw an other interesting topic about costs per custom table, and to consider extending a table like incident or starting from scratch (huge costs difference):
https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_blog&sys_id=82fd662ddbd0dbc01dcaf3231f96191f

Though, still questions like:

- What to do with supporting tables. Which just hold some supporting data, data that should be possible to be edited by a small group of users. I mean, theoretically, you have to pay for this table instantly! What you obviously don't want is to just leave ACL's out

- I do want to stick with ACL's and Roles. But this feels like... ACL's and Groups would be FREE? Probably not the way to go, as this is avoiding costs and maintaining these groups is harder than roles in my opinion.

- Should you work more with Subgroups? For example, a Service Desk group which has knowledge_admin role. Now for every user in this group you have to pay (knowledge_admin, but maybe also the inherited knowledge role?). Probably not everyone in de Service group needs knowledge_admin, maybe only half of them or three-quarter of the group. Should you then make a group like Knowledge Admin, just attach the necessary users to this group, and create a Service Desk group with all supposed Service Desk Users to this group? Feels a bit strange, still also gives more maintenance but would save costs.
(for example, looking at the community post, 1 user * 35 dollar * 12 months = 420 dollar. Or if it is a table like Incident, Problem, etc., it would be 1 user * 100 dollar * 12 months = 1,200 dollar.

- Are inherited roles taken into consideration? In the example above, knowledge_admin would already cost a bit. But this role inherits knowledge. Are you also paying for this role than (which feels a bit strange, feels like double costs).

- Etc. 🙂

Kind regards,
Mark