ServiceNow’s platform has expanded significantly in recent years, offering over 150 products. According to The Flexera 2024 State of ITAM report, ServiceNow is the fourth most relevant vendor for software asset management—behind Microsoft, AWS, and Salesforce—and 20% of respondents reported being audited by ServiceNow in the past three years.
ServiceNow’s product portfolio leverages various licensing metrics, making it difficult to assess license needs (and costs) based on actual usage. While ServiceNow does provide a subscription management application, it primarily focuses on product adoption—comparing purchased licenses versus allocated licenses—rather than measuring actual usage. Although the subscription management application does offer a view into license compliance, some of the provided data may be inaccurate, undermining confidence in your effective license position (ELP) during an audit.
To effectively optimize ServiceNow usage, you’ll need to:
- Ensure product adoption meets expectations.
- Prevent over-consumption of licenses by analyzing and recommending allocations to maintain compliance for applications included in multiple subscriptions.
- Accurately forecast and optimize license needs using actual usage data.
- Identify and address unused custom applications to reduce technical debt.
| Capability | Flexera | ServiceNow Subscription Management |
| Product adoption | Tracks adoption for product usage and license consumption | Tracks adoption only for license consumption |
| Ensure license compliance | Yes | Some data reported as inaccurate |
| Forecast and optimize license needs with usage data | Up to 2 years of historical data | Only 7 days of historical data provided |
| Track consumption against licenses purchased | Yes | No |
| Analyze the most cost-effective license allocation for products in multiple subscriptions | Yes | No |
| Model the most efficient licensing user type | Yes | No |
| Identify usage of custom applications to minimize technical debt | Yes | No |
| Find users with suspicious activities | Yes | No |
Let’s take a look at how Flexera’s scalable SaaS management product provides you with the necessary data to optimize your ServiceNow licenses.
Product adoption
Leveraging the ServiceNow API, Flexera provides an overview of how user licenses and consumption licenses are allocated by license name.
License compliance
For consumption-based licenses, Flexera provides an overview of the percentage consumed and alerts you if your usage trends exceed your monthly allowance, so you can predict if you need to buy more licenses to stay compliant.
Because of the breadth of ServiceNow functionality, some applications are included in multiple subscriptions—some less expensive than others. Flexera’s analytics engine provides usage details for all applications and automatically highlights opportunities to apply the most cost-effective licenses, ensuring compliance.
In this example, the ServiceNow application Request Management is included in three subscriptions—Fulfiller User v2, Customer Service Management Professional, and ITSA Unlimited. The use verification report’s commercial analysis helps administrators decide the best way to allocate licenses to ensure license compliance. In this scenario, while the Fulfiller license is more cost-effective, the ITSA Unlimited subscription ultimately keeps the organization compliant.
Optimize license usage and forecast license needs
If you find your organization has over-consumed or over-allocated licenses, Flexera provides usage details to help identify opportunities for reclamation, such as inactive or never-active users, and accounts belonging to employees who have left the company but still retain an allocated license.
In addition, Flexera provides usage trends with up to two years of historical data, enabling your organization to accurately forecast future license requirements before renewal periods.
Flexera ensures you understand the correct number of licenses you need as you look to renew. While ServiceNow’s report shows licenses allocated (consumed) including web users and never-active users, Flexera’s use verification report highlights license requirements based on actual usage to help you better plan the accurate count needed for your renewal.
This first view, ServiceNow Licensing, shows the reported data provided by the ServiceNow Subscription Management Application. In this example, we see 668 consumed licenses for the Service Management Suite v2-Fulfiller User.
When you view the use verification report, the picture is quite different. Here we see 568 active users. With a differential of 100 licenses needed, this adds up to thousands of dollars.
Many times, organizations will license everyone in the organization with an unrestricted license, which can be lower cost. However, if usage of unrestricted licenses is low, spending on higher cost fulfiller licenses might end up being more cost effective. Leveraging data from the Flexera use verification report, you can assess if moving away from the unrestricted model is right for your organization.
Find use of custom apps to reduce technical debt
ServiceNow provides the ability to create custom applications on its platform. Over time, technical debt can creep in if some of these applications are not used. Flexera helps identify the usage of custom applications, enabling you to streamline your environment and reduce your technical debt.
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