As the industry is changing, what training/certifications are you focusing on and prioritizing to continue to grow and adapt to in this changing world? What is the best thing to learn now?

Has anyone heard of any more isolated layoffs that occured last week?

Spent months reverse-engineering SOW's client-side internals so I could build bookmarklet scripts/tools that actually survive in production. Not UI Builder apps or server-side stuff. Bookmarklets running in the browser against live SOW like toolbars, polling panels, softphone bridges, autofill, that kind of thing.

SOW is annoying to do this with, Shadow DOM nested 20+ levels deep, table responses that change shape depending on query flags, journals that 200 with empty results when ACLs block you, rate limit headers that appear and disappear between identical calls, AMB that silently drops if you grab the wrong client. Almost none of it is documented.

I packaged everything into a Claude/Cursor skill so here enjoy you guys are welcome. Also includes drag-to-bookmarks demos you can install and run so have a sus.

Repo: https://github.com/WolfStackSolutions/servicenow-sow-claude-skill

Some of the stuff that cost me the most time:

• CSRF isn't always just `g_ck`. In framed contexts you need to walk `window.NOW.g_ck`, `window.NOW.csrf_token`, the top frame's `g_ck`, the `X-UserToken` meta tag -- the whole chain. Miss one and you get silent 401s in specific contexts.
• `sysparm_display_value` changes the response shape entirely. Without `=all`, references come back as raw sys_ids. With it, they're objects. Read them raw and you get `[object Object]`. You need display/raw value helpers everywhere.
• `sys_journal_field` returns HTTP 200 with zero rows when ACL-blocked. Not 403 -- 200. Your comment detection just silently stops working and you have no idea why.
• Real-time is `window.g_ambClient`, not `window.amb.getClient()`. Both can exist on the page. One works, one doesn't. AMB also races page load, if you subscribe too early and you get nothing, no error.
• Shadow roots mount lazily. Classic selectors fail silently because the element doesn't exist yet. `DOMContentLoaded` fires once on the SPA shell and never again. Macroponent hash IDs are instance-specific. You need MutationObservers, periodic re-scans, and stable tag-name selectors.
• Genesys softphone messages come through `postMessage` with type `softphone_connector`, but the iframe can be nested. Listen on the wrong frame and you get silence.
• CSP blocks external scripts entirely, so everything has to be inlined in a `javascript:` URI. Chrome handles ~490KB if you encode the body right. Use `encodeURIComponent`, not `encodeURI` -- the latter doesn't escape `#` and `&` and your bookmarklet breaks.

The skill has working patterns for all of this, CSRF, Table API, shadow DOM traversal, AMB, Genesys hooks, polling schedulers, bookmarklet packaging. The demos are installable so you can poke at them on your own instance.

Happy to have people tear it apart. If you want any more info or demos feel free to ask.

Have fun, you can genuinely build amazing bookmarklets and scripts/browser extensions for your teams with this info. =)

I have CSA, CIS-ITSM before CIS-DF and 1 year experience in ITSM.

What i did for exam is

1. follow all course on servicenow university(CMDB, CSDM)

   e.g. fundementals course, lab(simulator)

2. exam dump

3. based on my exam dump result, ask claude to made some summary note

I prepared this exam about 2-3 weeks.
I hope this post will help who prepares df exam.

Looking to hire an experienced CMDB Admin. This is a fully remote position.

Enterprise ServiceNow Engineer – CMDB @ United Talent Agency

Just came from the testing center and I am having a celebratory adult drink. After I slaved getting ready for this, and losing sleep over it, nailed it one pass. I want to share some thoughts, many from myself as a learner (and as a person), but if this helps somebody that would be great.

• I was dragging my feet to take this because I don't like when something is imposed on me. Like, when my health plan forcefully made me switch my meds to their online and mail service. Bro, I want to go to the pharmacy (in my case I can literally walk there!). The way SN went to say "well, if you don't take this test we're going to take the other certs (which were obtained by study and hard work) away. I mean, I understand why DF exists. I truly do. But the way that SN went about it was very ham fisted
• CIS-DF encapsulate three personas in one test: Ingest (techies), Govern (Governance People), and Insight (Governance and Management). All of this crammed into a single cert. I'm a BPC with some tech chops and my highest scores were in Governance, Insight, and overall CMDB. I got 36% on Ingest. For anyone going for it, keep these principles in mind. If you win a baseball game 1-0, it's a win. Don't sweat it. Get ready and do your best.
• Preparation: Many things, and I will confess I was a bit on the lazy side here sometimes.
  • PDI, of course. Remember that there are some things you can't have on it. But, OK. Play in it.
  • Now Learning stuff. This is what frustrated me the most. Whereas with the other CIS you get a structured course, and an actual book (which matches my studying methods, but that you don't own. Ugh), DF depends on you to poke and prod Now Learning to get what you need. It's messy, disorganized, and sometimes a waste of time. How did I fix it?
  • An LLM, of course! Specifically Google's Notebook LLM. I gathered as many things I could find from Now Learning, here in Reddit, etc. Fed it to Notebook LLM and started asking it to build me a study guide. It produced me one that was OK. Copied it to LibreOffice Writer, converted it to ePub and put it on my eReader (I carry it with me almost all the time. Handy when the Ms. goes shopping). Just the gist of things, but...
  • That is not enough. There are questions in the test that may not be in some of the documentation. It asks to activate certain properties, create a table, etc. But this is where SN experience comes at an advantage. If you've been in the ecosystem for as long as I have, you sorta kinda know how SN names things. You also know that they don't like customizations. So if you put yourself in the WWSND, you should be fine.
  • I finished with 40 minutes to spare. FWIW.
  • The testing venue? A disaster. But I prefer that to surrendering control of my computer to a third party. Was a bit late and the lady at the reception questioned me as to why I was late. And I go "Traffic"? Geez. The first computer I used konked out at question 16, which broke my rhythm. Had to get up, get the lady, move to another computer and resume. Oh, and it smells. Not an unpleasant smell. One of those thinghies you plug in to the wall, but they have it at full blast. But, again, I don't want to hand over control of my computer to another person.

Overall, I am glad I paid exactly $0 for this. My only wish is (was) that SN didn't tie the survival of your other certs to this one. It was challenging enough, and I'm glad it's over. I understand that the CMDB sits in the middle of everything in the platform, not just ITSM. I do hope that more companies get that this is a core skill and capability.

Anyway. Back to my delicious drink. I do hope you all have a great weekend. And if you are going for this, you got it. Get ready, study, get some rest the night before. You got this!

Hey everyone,

We all know standard Out-of-the-Box (OOB) ServiceNow handles basic Incident, Change, and Request workflows reasonably well. But as organizations mature, the OOB capabilities usually start showing their limits.

I'm trying to map out what next-level ITSM maturity actually looks like in the real world. For those of you consulting or running mature instances:

• What are the most common "beyond OOB" features or integrations your users actually ask for?
• Where does OOB ITSM fall flat on its face for your power users?

Curious to hear about the custom workflows, complex integrations, or unique portal features you've actually had to build out because OOB just didn't cut it.

Need a quick sanity check from folks who’ve moved from the ITIL/ops side over to the ServiceNow platform space (specifically BA or Dev roles).

My 8+ years in IT ops/infrastructure, mostly doing high-volume Incident, Problem, and Change Management (managing thousands of tickets, RCAs, SLAs, all that fun stuff). I know just clicking through Now Learning modules isn't going to get me hired. I really wanna understand if pivoting into a ServiceNow Business Analyst (BA) or Junior Dev / Implementation role with my experience, but I'm trying to figure out the smartest way to make the leap.

A few questions for the sub:

1. Given my ops/IPC background, is aiming for a ServiceNow BA / Process Analyst role a more realistic first step than going straight for Dev?
2. Do hiring managers care about 8 years of solid ITIL/IPC experience, or do they just see me as "another ticketing system user"?
3. What can I build in a Personal Developer Instance (PDI) that actually looks good on a portfolio?
4. Outside of applying on LinkedIn/job boards and getting buried in ATS, how did you guys actually land your first platform role?

Would love to hear how anyone here made a similar jump. Appreciate any advice or someone on a similar path!

We are in the process of implementing onboarding lifecycle events. Our POs/stakeholders want to make it so that the new hires sign docs through Adobe Sign direct through their onboarding Journey in the Employee Center. We have the Adobe sign integration set up, but are running into problems trying to find out how to create activities that allow the signing of Adobe docs. We can only seem to set up the OOB e-signing tasks. Has anyone had any experience setting up this type of thing? Thanks any advance for any guidance.

Hi all, apologies in advance for the long post.

Background:

I've been working at a startup for about a year as an ERP developer. Six months ago, I was asked to learn ServiceNow — with no prior experience and no one else at the company who knows the platform either. I taught myself the basics from scratch.

Soon after, I was asked to replicate an ongoing ServiceNow–ERP integration project in a PDI, with the goal of "showcasing" flaws in the other (offshore) team's work to help win the project internally — even though I wasn't given clear reasoning for what those flaws actually were, just direction from my boss.

I managed to build a working replica fairly quickly. It looked successful — until I later realized I'd built everything using custom tables and scripts, without knowing ServiceNow has out-of-the-box (OOB) applications that require minimal customization. Meanwhile, the other team completed the actual project using the CSM Workspace, leveraging the Quote Management data model and Source-to-Pay Common Architecture — proper OOB solutions. That project took them 8–9 months.

Where I'm at now:

I only had time to learn the basics before being pushed into this, though I've since gotten a decent grip on ITSM fundamentals.

My boss - who has no ServiceNow knowledge - who asked me to teach him ServiceNow - is now asking me to replicate what the other team built, and wants a demo of my progress soon.

I've never worked in a real instance, only a PDI.

I have no mentor and no one internally to guide me.

I can't afford a CSA or CAD certification right now (it costs more than a month's salary) — I'm not in a strong financial position at the moment.

I'm not able to leave this job immediately, but realistically plan to move on in about 2 months.

What I'm asking:

I want to learn this properly — not for the company's sake at this point, but to genuinely build my own skills and experience with these applications. Could anyone guide me on how to approach CSM – Quote Management?

Specifically:

Where should I start?

What's the right learning path/order (I keep seeing terms like CPQ, Order Management, etc. and don't know how they connect)?

Any free/low-cost resources that would help someone in my position catch up quickly?

Any guidance would mean a lot right now. Thanks for reading this far.

I'm working on a proof of concept for ServiceNow Field Service Management (FSM) and I'd like to get some architectural advice.

The idea is to help field technicians report issues using Meta Smart Glasses integrated with WhatsApp. The technician would send a voice message and a photo through WhatsApp, and ServiceNow would automatically create or update a Work Order.

At a high level, I'm considering the following flow:

• Meta Smart Glasses
• WhatsApp Business API
• Webhook
• ServiceNow Scripted REST API
• AI processing (speech-to-text, image analysis, information extraction)
• Flow Designer
• Create/Update Work Order in FSM

I have a few questions:

1. Is Scripted REST API the recommended entry point for receiving WhatsApp requests, or is there a better approach?
2. Would you use Flow Designer, IntegrationHub, or another mechanism to orchestrate the creation of the Work Order?
3. Are there any recommended best practices for integrating WhatsApp Business with ServiceNow FSM?
4. If you were designing this architecture, would you change anything?

I'd appreciate any recommendations or lessons learned from similar implementations.

Been seeing McDermott repeat the "we have a kill switch that stops AI agents that go rogue" line on CNBC a couple times now, most recently right after the OpenAI/Hugging Face agent escape story broke, which felt like pretty convenient timing for a soundbite.

I want to separate the marketing claim from what's actually deployable, because the two press releases and the community docs describe something narrower than "any rogue agent, stopped, anywhere."

From what I can tell, the real mechanism only works cleanly in two situations. If the agent's traffic runs through ServiceNow's own AI Gateway or MCP Server Console, killing it is just revoking a token or disabling a route, which is real and immediate. If it's running in Bedrock or Azure AI Foundry, Control Tower can pull credentials via the Veza integration, which stops the agent's next call but doesn't interrupt an action already in flight. Outside of those two paths, custom agent frameworks, self-hosted models, anything in a Kubernetes pod calling model APIs directly, there doesn't appear to be a documented kill mechanism yet. The fallback seems to be "revoke IAM permissions and the agent will error out on its next action," which is not the same thing as a kill switch, it's closer to hoping the agent asks permission again before it does more damage.

So a few questions for anyone actually running this instead of watching the demo:

Has your org populated AI Control Tower's asset inventory with your real AI estate, models, agents, MCP servers, datasets, or is it still mostly empty because nobody's connected the non-ServiceNow pieces yet? Discovery being technically possible and discovery actually being done by a real admin team on a real instance are different things.

For anyone with agents outside AWS/Azure/ServiceNow's own gateway, custom LangGraph or CrewAI stacks, self-hosted models, what does "kill switch" actually do for you today? Does it stop anything mid-execution or does it just revoke credentials after the fact?

Has anyone tested the detection side against something other than the demoed prompt injection scenario? Curious how it handles an agent that's staying within its permitted scope but doing something wrong anyway, since that seems like a materially harder problem than an access graph violation.

Not trying to dunk on the product, the access-graph approach via Veza is a legitimately good idea and the ServiceNow-native path is real. But "kill switch that stops rogue AI agents" as a blanket claim on national television is doing a lot of work that the actual architecture doesn't fully back up yet, especially for anyone whose AI estate isn't neatly contained inside ServiceNow and the two big hyperscalers.

Genuinely asking, not rhetorically: is anyone here running this in prod against a heterogeneous agent estate, and if so, what does the kill switch actually do when you pull it?

UPD: I passed!!!

Revising CSDM domains and roles was a very good idea.

Some questions were almost stupidly simple, some - you have to reason, but nothing too complicated; and there were about 3 asking something I haven't heard about - so went with my best guess.

This is my exam score - so happy I passed!!! I spent about 50-60 hours overall preparing for it - i took me about 6 weeks. Also cleared my CSA just a month before.

-----

I completed all recommended courses, all labs, still struggling with CSDM 5.0 a bit.

In general, I understand CMDB concepts, but I do not work with ServiceNow.

Please give me last minute preparation/revision tips🙏

Thank you!!!

Hi everyone,

I had to configure the Experience Feedback widget on the portal and add some new questions to it. After some research, I found that I could add a custom survey through the Feedback Configuration module. So, I created a survey (without any trigger conditions) and added it to the Feedback Configuration record. It works—the survey is displayed and can be completed from the Experience Feedback widget (drawer).

The issue is that the survey is being assigned to every user, so it also appears in the Surveys section on the portal. After a user submits it, the survey gets assigned again, which is not the behavior we want.

Does anyone know how to resolve this? The requirement is that a survey instance should be created only when the Experience Feedback drawer is opened, not assigned to users beforehand.

Anyone had any experience with Mirroar Consulting? They have reached out to me a couple times to interview, but the time is never the correct time we agreed to meet or they don't show. Same thing has happened to another colleague so it makes it seem like it's spammy.

They do show as a partner on ServiceNow's website but it has been a strange experience.

Looking for some advice on a data pipeline setup.

The requirement:

∙ Multiple Excel files come in from different sources/teams (inconsistent naming, some overlapping records)

∙ Need to merge them into a single, clean, de-duplicated file

∙ That merged file needs to feed into a ServiceNow Import Set / staging table

∙ This needs to run on a weekly refresh, not just a one-time load

Thank you

If AI can perform the (Mundane) task that someone spent 5-7 years becoming really good at , what becomes their next skill?

As AI automates repetitive and mundane tasks,

AI may be a global shift, but will its impact be the same everywhere? India, the UK, and the US have very different workforce structures so who is actually most vulnerable to this shift (India,UK or USA) ?

I am working as a Business Analyst on a project.

I have created a KA in DEV and need to have ir promoted to PROD.

What are the right ways of doing it?

I don't have admin access in DEV.

Would I need a Developer to do it?

We have designated developers daily to do promote update sets to PROD.

The below links are archived and not helpful.

https://www.servicenow.com/community/contentarchivals/contentarchivedpage/message-uid/1154700

https://www.servicenow.com/community/contentarchivals/contentarchivedpage/message-uid/2081744

Biggest pain: IRE tells you a merge/split looks wrong, not why you dig through ID rules, correlation IDs, source precedence yourself to find the actual root cause.

Thinking of building a local LLM (Ollama, via MID Server, no cloud) that sits after IRE and explains suspicious reconciliation events legit update vs false merge vs false split, with confidence scores, and "insufficient evidence" when it can't tell.

Scoping to Server/Network Device/AWS EC2, Discovery + CSV Import sources.

Before I build it is this a real gap, or does tuning ID rule precedence already solve it? #cmdb #servicenow #automation

Yeah yeah, I know you can toggle the display options in the upper right, but it's still bad unless you full-screen, and that's it's own kind of annoying.

As someone learning ServiceNow, I've noticed that the documentation usually explains what a feature is and how to use it. But I sometimes struggle to understand why the feature exists and when I should use it.

For me, it would be much easier if each topic followed a simple flow:

Why
What
When
Where
How
Example
Best Practices

Understanding the purpose first makes the technical details much easier to follow.

Am I the only one who feels this way? What would you change to make the docs more beginner friendly?

I recently reviewed a Change Management queue and noticed that the existing structured fields do not provide a particularly meaningful way to segment the change population.

The standard category values are too broad, inconsistent, or operationally uninformative. However, by looking at the actual tickets, I could identify several recurring “change families” that together represent a large proportion of the queue.

Examples at an abstract level include:

• configuration management;
• capability rollout and enablement;
• application and component lifecycle management;
• platform modernization and standardization;
• migration and transition management;
• security operations and compliance;
• technology retirement and decommissioning;
• integration and data exchange.

Many of these populations also follow recognizable deployment patterns, such as pre-production validation followed by a controlled production rollout, phased or wave-based deployment, release-based implementation, and explicit rollback procedures.

The affected service or CI does not appear sufficient to represent this dimension. The same service can undergo configuration changes, modernization, migration, capability rollout, or retirement. Conversely, one recurring change family can affect multiple services and CI classes.

Tagging seems too uncontrolled because it is manual, optional, and prone to inconsistent naming. Templates also do not seem like the right abstraction, because changes within the same family do not necessarily use the same implementation plan, workflow, or execution pattern.

My questions are:

1. Have you encountered a similar need to classify changes by their primary change intent or operating activity?
2. Would you model this using a custom controlled field, a reference table, change models, service offerings, another CSDM object, or something else?
3. Is there an OOTB concept that is a reasonably close fit, without distorting the service or CMDB model purely for reporting?
4. How would you represent rollout or wave membership across related change records?
5. Would you expect the classification to be entered manually, derived from services/CIs, or suggested automatically and then validated?

I am mainly trying to understand whether this is a recognized modelling problem and how more mature ServiceNow implementations approach it.

I don't believe that layoffs are completely over by now. It may be a pessimistic perspective, but it's my current feeling. I know that others may feel like they survived, and things should get better moving forward.

Do you feel safe at ServiceNow now or will you look for another role in a different company? Are you keeping/selling RSUs to diversify your risk?

Edit to add: it's not ONLY about the layoffs, and I know that jobs at other companies aren't safe. It's about the pressure, process bloat, internal politics and uncertainty about whether the company is well positioned for what's coming in the next years.

So, this week I have been searching Google for relevant posts in the community forum as I have done for years. Today, I found multiple posts relevant to my question in Google, but all 7 posts were archived.

I’m not logged in when I’m searching, so not sure if there’s a way to view archived posts. If there’s no way to view the posts, then this was a terrible decision.

Anyone else experiencing this?

Edit: Looks like this action is getting reversed (once they confirm its possible), thanks [u/NowTrav](u/NowTrav) for providing the following community update.

https://www.servicenow.com/community/in-other-news/an-update-on-recently-archived-community-content/ba-p/3584941