Exploring Subscription Management
Summarize
Summary of Exploring Subscription Management
Subscription Management provides ServiceNow customers with a consolidated, real-time view of product subscriptions and their applications, enabling proactive management of entitlements. This capability helps you maximize subscription usage, maintain compliance, and avoid unexpected costs by tracking usage and allocation trends over time.
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Key Users and Roles
- Instance Admin: Responsible for allocating per-user subscriptions by adding groups to product subscriptions, mapping custom tables and applications to subscriptions, and monitoring usage to ensure compliance and optimize subscription utilization.
- Chief Information Officer (CIO) or Service Owner: Collaborates with the platform owner to purchase new subscriptions.
- ServiceNow Platform Owner: Reviews purchased products and applications within the Impact platform.
Subscription Management Workflow
The typical workflow involves purchasing subscriptions, viewing them in the Impact platform and Subscription Management, then allocating entitlements by the instance admin. Subscription approvals can be integrated with group managers for security or financial compliance. Continuous monitoring of subscription data supports informed decision-making and compliance management.
Practical Benefits and Features
- Fix Over-Allocated Subscriptions: Use insights to identify and correct subscription overallocation.
- View and Allocate Unallocated Subscriptions: Leverage recommended groups to efficiently assign entitlements.
- Map Custom Tables and Applications: Associate global custom tables and custom applications with product subscriptions to maximize usage and compliance.
- Monitor Subscription Details: Access detailed views of subscription allocations, usage patterns, application popularity, and custom table usage over time.
Next Steps
To fully utilize Subscription Management, explore additional resources on configuration, managing per-user subscriptions, handling custom tables and applications, and monitoring capacity subscriptions. These resources provide guidance on tailoring Subscription Management to your organization's specific needs.
Learn how Subscription Management helps you track and manage your product subscriptions and their applications.
Subscription Management Overview
- Gain visibility and control of your product subscriptions and their applications.
- Access a real‑time view of your entitlement data.
- Maximize subscription usage and make informed decisions about purchases by viewing insights.
- Stay in compliance and avoid unexpected costs by tracking subscription usage and allocations over time.
Subscription Management users
| User | Description |
|---|---|
| Instance admin | The instance admin allocates per-user subscriptions by adding groups to a product subscription. The instance admin maps custom tables and custom applications to subscriptions with available entitlements to maximize subscription usage and stay in compliance. |
Subscription Management workflow
This infographic shows a sample end-to-end workflow of how different users in an organization work together to purchase, allocate, and manage subscriptions.
In this workflow:
- The chief information officer or service owner works with the ServiceNow platform owner to purchase new subscriptions.
- After the purchase is complete, the platform owner views the products and applications in Impact.
- The instance admin views the new product subscriptions in Subscription Management on the production instance. For more information, see Product subscriptions overview.
- The instance admin performs the following tasks in Subscription Management:
- Allocates per-user subscriptions by adding groups to a product subscription, which grants entitlement to all group members. For more information, see Managing per-user subscriptions in Subscription Management.
- Maps custom tables and custom applications to subscriptions with available entitlements to maximize subscription usage and stay in compliance. For more information, see Managing custom tables and applications in Subscription Management.
- If the organization requires security approvals before adding users to groups or financial approvals before subscriptions are allocated to users, the instance admin works with group managers to create subscription approval workflows that determine who gets a subscription when new users are added to groups.
- The instance admin monitors subscription usage to stay in compliance and make informed decisions on future purchases, consistently monitoring the following data:
- Over-allocated subscriptions
- Unmapped custom applications and tables
- Usage patterns over time
- Application popularity
- Custom table usage
Subscription Management benefits
| Benefit | Feature | User |
|---|---|---|
| Fix over-allocated subscriptions | Insights | Instance admin |
| View unallocated subscriptions | Insights | Instance admin |
| Allocate available subscriptions using recommended groups | Allocate subscriptions | Instance admin |
| Map global custom tables to a product subscription | Issues | Instance admin |
| Map custom applications to a product subscription | Issues | Instance admin |
| View a summary of subscription allocations | Subscription details | Instance admin |
| View subscription allocation details over time | Subscription details | Instance admin |
| View custom table usage over time | Subscription details | Instance admin |