ServiceNow Administrator Training | What All Topics to Learn and Practice

In this ServiceNow administrator training article you will come to know about each and everything related to ServiceNow Administration, there roles and responsibilities, what all topics you should learn, explore and practice to become ServiceNow administrator, basic overview of ServiceNow topics and we will also provide details from where you can learn all these topics and can master ServiceNow administration.

Something About ServiceNow First:

ServiceNow is a Software as a Service platform that is licensed on a subscription basis similar to other products such as salesforce, workday etc. You not need to install ServiceNow and you can directly access ServiceNow on browsers.  ServiceNow instance is stored in ServiceNow datacenters and you can access that through your browser. 

ServiceNow started with ITSM application and most popular application is incident management. ServiceNow now expanded rapidly and now much more than of ITSM application. Now ServiceNow is into ITSM, ITOM, ITBM, ITAM, DevOPs, Security Operations, HR Service Delivery, Customer Service Management, Governance, Risk and Compliance and with each and every release ServiceNow is adding lots of to these applications. 

ServiceNow has a release in each and every 6 or 8 month which is named after cities. ServiceNow introduces new changes to the platform in the form of Feature release, patch release and hotfix. The current ServiceNow release is Quebec. It is Ok if you are reading this article after Quebec.

Lets Begin with ServiceNow Administrator Training:

So, the first thing you have to do is, you have to create your ServiceNow Personal Developer Instance, it is free of cost and it will help you to do hands on or practice and learn. In ServiceNow documentation you will get the guide that will help you to create the same or you can also search the same on YouTube (Basico ServiceNow Learning YouTube channel), you will find lots of videos which will help to you to create for yourself.

Below is the thing which comes under ServiceNow administrator role and responsibilities.

• Configuration of List, form and UI
• Customizations (UI, Policies, Schedulers, Data)
• User Administration (User, Roles, Groups Creation)
• Service Level Agreement Configuration (SLA's)
• System Administration
• Table and Fields
• Update Sets Movement from one instance to another
• ServiceNow Instance Cloning
• ServiceNow Version Upgrade

We will talk about on all of the above topic in details in this article below and believe us you will learn lots of things below and can practice the same stuff on personal instance.

ServiceNow User Administration:

The most important section of ServiceNow. In user administration ServiceNow administrator has to create user, make them active & inactive, import user data into ServiceNow instance,  create new roles, provide roles to user, remove roles from user, Align user to required group and remove user from groups, align roles to groups etc. Roles In ServiceNow is used to provide permission to users or users in the group. Role table name is (sys_user_role). Ther are lots of out of the box roles. Some of the populer roles are : itil, admin, security_admin, itil_admin, report_admin, impersonator etc. Role can be of read, write or delete and all these three thing is controlled through ACL, which basically grant access to anything and the permission to perform activity. You can get little idea from below:

Access controls are assign to role ---> roles are assign to groups ---> users are assign to groups

 ACL will be discuss in detail with examples in other article.

So now the important thing you should be aware of in ServiceNow user administration:

• User may have 0 (zero) roles or more roles and may be in 0 group or in more groups. 
• User may also be assigned delegates or in other words any user can delegate his stuff to other user for a specific time. for example if manager goes on leave then he can make team lead his delegate to perform his approval task etc. User table is (sys_user)
• The best practice is to assign roles to group and add users to those group whom he required roles. Group table is (sys_user_group)

ServiceNow Tables and Fields

Each servicenow instance have over 2000 tables out of the box. Each application have one or more tables. Tables can extend other tables as well.

All tables are of lower case and use underscore instead of spaces. With admin role we can create and modify table. Each table contain many fields. Some of the major tables are Task [task], Incident [incident], User [sys_user], Group [sys_user_group], role [sys_user_role], Service Catalog [sc_catalog], Location [cmn_location], configuration item [cmdb_ci] etc.

Task table is a parent table for lots of table such as incident, change, problem etc.

Whatever changes we made in tables and fields all these changes stores in database tables. The data dictionary tables contain metadata about the tables and fields in servicenow. Some of data dictionary tables are sys_db_object [Each record in in this table represents table], sys_dictionary [Each record in this table represents fields on a table], sys_documentation [Each record in this table represent human readable field labels, etc].

A table contains many fields and fields are of many types such as string, date, time, true.false, list, html, script, integer, choice etc. There are some fields which get auto created when we create any new table, field name such as created, created by, updated, updated by, Sys Id (unique value which contains 32 character hexadecimal string and it automatically generated for all the records), Updates (store integer value which tell number of time table updated).

There are relationship between some tables for example incident, change_request table extend task table so incident and change_request table is child table and task table is parent table of incident table. Relationship between tables are very important. 

Why relationship is required, lets say Task table contain fields which is required in any other tables, so what we can do, we can extend task table and we can get all those fields in required tables. Here keep in mind that while changing any attribute of any extended field, you should be aware of Dictionary Override concept. Because if you do changes in the extended table field, then those changes will be reflected in all the table extending task table. 

Relationship can be one to many and can be many to many (example of many to many relationship is: each user have many groups or each groups can have many users).

You can see schema map of any table to see how many table is extending or extended by and many more other relationships such as referenced table, referencing table. Schema map is visual diagram which show tables relationship in ServiceNow instance and it is really very important representation.

Explore tables & columns module in System Definition section in ServiceNow, it will definitely help you know more things in details such as attribute, properties etc.

Configuration of List, Form and UI

The data which user filled in form is save as a record in database and all those records are displayed in List view (Basically list view is representation of all the records available in the table) as displayed in below screenshot. So the configuration of List, Form and UI has been taken care by ServiceNow administrator. ServiceNow admin will configure the Form here the configuration means that what all field need to displayed to User, What all field should be displayed in Form section and what all section should be displayed to user in Related List.

Currently we are updating the content and will add more useful content into this article. Please we with us and bookmark this page for future.

There are lots of video you will find on the YouTube channel to learn above topics. You can also refer Basico ServiceNow Learning YouTube channel or website for the same.

We hope all the above content related to ServiceNow administration and topics need to practice or learn to become ServiceNow administrator will help you. There is no need to spend money on ServiceNow Administrator Training, you will find all the content over here or in internet. The only thing is that you have to cover all the topics one by one and also have to do hands-on on the same on ServiceNow personal developer instance. Please share your feedback below and let us know if you need information on any of the topic. Thankyou!!!