Michaela Kaufmanova, Autor SnowMirror

Because it works as an extension to products like ServiceNow or Salesforce, SnowMirror is sometimes misunderstood, but once potential users understand how useful it is and how much functionality it enables, it quickly becomes a must-have part of a company’s IT stack.

One frequent misconception among companies interested in using SnowMirror involves questions over whether the software needs to be installed on a physical computer in the company’s infrastructure or if it can be installed on another cloud, such as Microsoft Azure. “SnowMirror can definitely be installed on Azure or any other cloud service that provides Windows virtual machines,” Müller said, adding that “the SnowMirror installation process is pretty simple on a Windows VM using the standard installer.”

Understanding what SnowMirror does and doesn’t do is also important, Müller explained, providing a few examples of things replication doesn’t solve. “SnowMirror doesn’t make the reports,” he explained. “It provides the underlying data to other tools such as Tableau, PowerBI or Qlik, and those provide the reports.”

SnowMirror also doesn’t map data to the customer’s data warehouse, he explained. “There aren’t any transformation functions in SnowMirror, so users will have to map their data to the requirements of the given tool themselves,” he explained.

SnowMirror is a read-only tool, and that is a benefit. “In reality you don’t want to have a tool that can update or even delete ServiceNow data in bulk without any controls,” he explained. “It isn’t a two-way tool,” Müller said.

Certain users may also not understand that a SnowMirror license also includes regular updates to keep compatible with ServiceNow’s six month release schedule, Müller added. “We guarantee that SnowMirror will be compatible with ServiceNow’s release when it comes out. In fact, because we work closely with ServiceNow, we start work on compatibility very early in their release process,” he explained.

If you’d like to to talk with us about how SnowMirror can help your business get the most out of ServiceNow, get in touch.

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There are a lot of reasons why companies use ServiceNow – its ease of use, the fact that it’s a cloud application, its extensibility and its huge community are just some of the reasons. At the same time, business dashboards are becoming an ever more important tool for companies seeking to make use of the large amounts of data their companies generate.

A business dashboard is an information management tool that is used to track KPIs, metrics, and other key data points relevant to a business, department, or specific process. Through the use of data visualizations, dashboards simplify complex data sets to provide users with at a glance awareness of current performance.

What many ServiceNow users may not know about is that they are not limited to the Now Platform’s default reporting tools. Data can be exported from the ServiceNow cloud for use with third-party dashboard and business intelligence applications such as Tableau, Microsoft PowerBI, Qlik and SAP BusinessObjects BI.

That’s what SnowMirror makes possible. SnowMirror is a smart replication tool for ServiceNow that lets you make copies of your ServiceNow data from the cloud to your own infrastructure, flexibly, reliably and powerfully. Using SnowMirror, companies are able to make a replica of their ServiceNow data, either to on-premises hardware or to a company’s cloud services – SnowMirror is compatible with all leading cloud solutions, including Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure, as well as up-and-coming services such as Snowflake.

Once SnowMirror replicates data from your ServiceNow cloud instance, it’s relatively easy to connect your dashboard tool. You can set the extent of replication with several different parameters according to your requirements. The end result is a dataset that’s constantly updated with relevant information from ServiceNow, one which can then feed your dashboard.

As with most decisions made in the IT sector, there’s a debate about whether it’s better to build a custom dashboard in-house, to buy one pre-made or to hire an external developer to make one according to your requirements. An entire ecosystem of third-party dashboard makers provide both custom dashboard creation and pre-built dashboards that run on platforms like Tableau or Microsoft PowerBI.

The good news is that SnowMirror supports all of these solutions and most of the top dashboard platforms, so we have you covered no matter how you decide.

We go into greater detail about making successful data visualisations in this blog post, and in other blog posts we discuss using SnowMirror with cloud services such as Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure. In addition, SnowMirror has a detailed and updated admin guide here.

If you’d like to to talk with us about how SnowMirror can help your business get the most out of ServiceNow, get in touch: pavel.muller@snow-mirror.com.

ServiceNow Knowledge 2020 inspires and energises leaders to unlock new ways of working

In light of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic, ServiceNow has made the wise decision of moving its annual Knowledge event into the digital space to protect its community and attendees. But that also means this will become a truly global event, with attendees no longer having to visit Orlando, FL in person on May 5.

Knowledge is an annual event with a global reach where experts in the workflow automation sector come together to share their insights and drive innovation across a wide range of core business disciplines. This is an opportunity to showcase the ways business leaders can unlock productivity by migrating to modern digitized workflows, highlight the latest innovations, and inspire the wider ServiceNow community to continually create great customer and employee experiences.

Knowledge 2020 will feature keynote presentations from several ServiceNow executives:

Spanning a wide range of disciplines, this year’s keynote speakers will cover topics such as business leadership, workflow automation, recruitment automation, and the latest innovations in enterprise resource planning and other platforms. Other topics typically covered during the Knowledge events include IT service management, security operations, human resources, and finance, as well as any other key business operations and departments which can benefit from workflow automation. You can stay informed on developments via ServiceNow’s social media channels, podcasts, and community hub.

As with previous events, Knowledge 2020 will feature engaging breakout sessions in which ServiceNow leaders and customers share their best practices across several industries and business models. These sessions explore the various ways organizations have successfully embarked on a journey of innovation to improve efficiency, reduce overheads, and enhance profitability in a rapidly changing world. They’ll provide hands-on advice tailored to the unique needs of specific industry sectors, which attendees can take back to their own organizations.

Above all, Knowledge is a thought leadership event where leading industry innovators come together to discuss the impact of workflow automation and its associated technologies and processes. These include artificial intelligence, smart data analytics, workforce mobility, and more. By bringing lots of industry experts together, there’ll be a wealth of valuable information to share to help ServiceNow customers achieve more. Thought leaders will also be exploring the anticipated challenges in the years to come, which will prove especially important in these uncertain times.

First and foremost, Knowledge 2020 is about people and community in the world of business, government, healthcare, and many other verticals. Technology is simply the glue that holds it all together. That’s why the event revolves around its community of like-minded individuals including technologists, thought leaders, and innovators across a wide range of experiences and skills. The digital forum provides a hub for connecting with others in your field and take work to the next level.

GuideVision empowers enterprises to achieve more with expertly guided workflow automation implementations powered by ServiceNow. Talk to us today to find out more.

ServiceNow is an extremely effective platform not only for ITSM but for managing many aspects of a company’s operation. This has long been clear. But one of the areas that may go underutilized among ServiceNow users is the ability to collect large amounts of valuable data which can then be analysed in specialized business intelligence platforms. That’s where SnowMirror comes in. SnowMirror is a smart replication platform for ServiceNow that makes a copy of your company’s ServiceNow data on your own infrastructure. It can help you identify the opportunities hidden in ServiceNow data.

For example, a third-party business intelligence platform such as Tableau can be used to identify important trends, usage patterns and information that may have been overlooked in standard reporting. For example, a company called Linium has created a Tableau dashboard that uses ServiceNow data to track where assets are physically located in an organization, which can then be used for tasks such as determining which priority to upgrade hardware.

In the example Linium provides, “let’s say your boss wants to start repairing all of the computers in maintenance and he wants you to find out what needs to be fixed. By using this dashboard, you can easily view all of the computers that are in maintenance, their model type, their exact location, and how much they cost. In addition to giving your boss a list of all the computers that need to be repaired, you can also give him insight as what parts need to be ordered, the proximity of the computers to one another, and the priority as to which computers should be repaired first.”

“The key here is flexibility: reports that are dynamic allow you to achieve unique reporting needs by customizing the granularity of the information and the dimensions by which the information is presented,” they continue.

ServiceNow data can also be used to identify ITSM problems that can be turned into opportunities, such as identifying the heaviest users of a certain support task at a certain location, which can then be addressed in a number of time- and labour-saving ways. While it’s true that the standard reporting in ServiceNow can provide some of this functionality, dedicated BI tools are more flexible, user-friendly and powerful. They can also combine ServiceNow data from other data sources.

For companies that use ServiceNow to power the provision of outsourced ITSM services, this can mean aggregating data to identify marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) or even sales qualified leads (SQLs, not to be confused with the database standard) ready for upselling. One example of such a use case scenario would be queries to a call center powered by ServiceNow. Another is the classic IT support desk.

A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a lead that is interested in your product, but may not yet be at the sale level. As Tableau writes on their blog, a marketing qualified lead is someone who is open to the idea of a sale but has not yet bought. This data could be found in behaviour patterns captured by ServiceNow and identifies potential customers for cross-selling or upselling.

Here are some examples Tableau provides of marketing qualified lead actions:

Identifying and tracking MQLs isn’t just for external outsourcing providers. Internal ITSM efforts, internal marketing and training can all be deployed to save a company time and effort.

SnowMirror is a crucial part of the toolchain that goes from ServiceNow to BI tools like Tableau. Because it provides flexible and reliable replication of your ServiceNow data to your own infrastructure, SnowMirror makes it far easier and more effective to run complex queries and reports without causing undue load on your ServiceNow cloud instance – the data is already off the cloud.

If you’d like to to talk with us about how SnowMirror can help your business get the most out of ServiceNow.

The developing situation around the coronavirus pandemic affects us all, and in light of recent events, we wanted to be proactive and give you an update on SnowMirror’s response.

The good news is that there has been no change whatsoever in SnowMirror’s operations. All team members are available to provide support by email on the support@snow-mirror.com address as you require it. Our team is safe and working remotely, and our infrastructure and processes are flexible enough to allow sustained remote working.

Development of the next SnowMirror version also continues as usual. As with previous versions, you can expect the next SnowMirror release to coincide with the next ServiceNow release for maximum compatibility. Tle latest SnowMirror release was version 4.6 on 13 March 2020.

The recent massive shift to working remotely has also underscored the importance of having a coherent and flexible cloud strategy. In addition to using SnowMirror to replicate ServiceNow data to your own premises, it can also be used to replicate your data to cloud services such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure or Snowflake.

We are available to provide assistance on your transition to a cloud-based solution. Feel free to get in touch with me to discuss this further.

They may seem similar, but there is an important difference between operational and strategic business intelligence, especially with regard to ServiceNow. As a smart replication tool for ServiceNow data, SnowMirror supports both, of course, but we’d like to go into a bit more detail about these differences so that we can help your business get the most out of its valuable ITSM data.

This article from BI-Insider.com has a very good definition of both operational and strategic business intelligence. “In general, operational business intelligence provides time-sensitive, relevant information to operations managers, business professionals, and front-line, customer-facing employees to support daily work processes. Additionally if the data retrieved from the analysis directly supports or helps complete an operational tasks, then the intelligence is operational in nature,” the author writes.

On the other hand, according to BI-insider.com, strategic business intelligence “is often associated with reporting from an analytical data source, data mart, or data warehouse. Fundamentally, strategic business intelligence improves a business process by analysing a predetermined set of metrics relevant to that process and provides historical context of data. In addition, strategic intelligence provides the basis for forecasting, goal-setting, and strategic planning and direction.”

While ServiceNow has embedded reporting capability native to the Now Platform and available to all products, to get strategic BI, data usually needs to be taken outside the platform where it was collected so that it can be analysed with specialised tools such as PowerBI or Tableau.

This is where SnowMirror comes in. SnowMirror replicates data from ServiceNow and Salesforce, making copies from the cloud on to a company’s own infrastructure, where it is stored in a data warehouse. From there it can be analysed by PowerBI, Tableau or any number of other BI tools.

Strategic BI is important to IT service management because it uses existing data to identify patterns, spot trends and make projections. In his article for the ITSM Tools website, Stephan Mann identifies several key capabilities that are made possible by strategic BI, such as “understanding how the IT ecosystem works in reality to identify which service levels can’t be consistently met, or conversely those that can never fail and are as such pretty useless as targets.”

Mann also argues that strategic BI can help to demonstrate how raising or lowering service levels will increase or decrease IT costs versus the change in business performance. “It could be an easy way to reduce IT costs with a minimal impact on business operations,” he writes.

This comes down to the kinds of problems your business needs to solve. Operational reports can provide a view to current performance related to KPIs. But strategic reports can help businesses set targets based on insights into historical data. Each has outputs that can be displayed in dashboards which are used by different stakeholders in the company – strategic data is used by senior teams to track key performance indicators on the strategy level and which present them the chance to take a specific course of action.

Strategic data and resource forecasting

For example, strategic data can be used in resource forecasting. Senior IT managers can gain insights into which resources will be needed in the near and distant future based on IT strategies and corporate plans. The data could help managers with tasks ranging from deciding on when staff should take vacations to identifying optimum training days. It can also help to identify the tasks that are the most expensive for an organisation, or to benchmark which departments are adopting best practices and where efficiencies in other teams can be made.

Whether your needs are for operational or strategic reporting, SnowMirror can help. SnowMirror has been developed based on feedback from hundreds of leading companies worldwide and provides smart data replication from the cloud to your company’s infrastructure, where you can use the strategic BI tools of your choice – including PowerBI, Tableau, SAP Business Objects BI, Qlik and many more.

If you’d like to to talk with us about how SnowMirror can help your business get the most out of ServiceNow, get in touch here.

This is the second in a series of blog posts intended to serve as an introduction to SnowMirror for executives who may be new to the tool, its uses and benefits.

ServiceNow’s functionality, flexibility and community have made it extremely popular among companies looking to automate their workflows. In addition, the data collected in ServiceNow also has tremendous value if it can be analyzed to create insights. But that requires specialized data analysis tools like Tableau.

That’s where SnowMirror comes in as an intermediate step between ServiceNow and Tableau. SnowMirror is a smart replication tool for ServiceNow that lets you make copies of your ServiceNow data from the cloud to your own infrastructure, flexibly, reliably and powerfully. Using SnowMirror, companies are able to make a replica of their ServiceNow data, either to on-premises hardware or to cloud services like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Snowflake. Tableau can also be run on-premises at a company, or run from cloud services such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS.

Once your company’s data is replicated to your infrastructure, you can use Tableau to analyze the data for important trends, usage patterns and information that may have been overlooked in standard reporting. Data analyzed by Tableau can also power effective dashboards that can help managers to make more informed decisions.

How those dashboards are designed and perceived is something Tableau is concerned with as well. For example, the Tableau documentation provides insightful advice on how to approach dashboard design. “The best visualizations have a clear purpose and work for their intended audience. What will you be trying to say with this dashboard? Are you presenting a conclusion or a key question?”

The Tableau documentation also advises a key point when designing a dashboard. “In addition to knowing what you’re trying to say, it’s important to know who you’re saying it to. Does your audience know this subject matter extremely well or will it be new to them? What kind of cues will they need? Thinking about these questions before you head into the design phase can help you create a successful dashboard.”

In many cases, the decision of whether to use the default reporting tools in ServiceNow or a third-party tool such as Tableau boils down to the kind of reporting your company needs operational reporting or strategic reporting. In somewhat simplified terms, operational reports can provide a view to current performance related to KPIs. But strategic reports can help businesses set targets based on insights into historical data. In this way, Tableau is better used as a tool for strategic reporting and analysis.

However you set out to use Tableau in your company, you can rest assured that SnowMirror will provide your data reliably and flexibly.

If you’d like to to talk with us about how SnowMirror can help your business get the most out of ServiceNow, please get in touch.

This is the first in a series of blog posts intended to serve as an introduction to SnowMirror for executives who may be new to the tool, its uses and benefits.

ServiceNow’s Now Platform is massively popular with companies because of its ease of use, the fact that it’s a cloud application, its extensibility and its huge community. And while ServiceNow started as a platform for managing IT services, it has grown to include many different aspects of a company’s operation, including HR and financials.

Because ServiceNow is a cloud service, many companies may think that they don’t need to worry about backups and replication of their data. They may not even know that it’s possible to make a replica of their ServiceNow data to their own infrastructure.

It is possible, and that’s where SnowMirror comes in. SnowMirror is a smart data replication tool for ServiceNow, and with SnowMirror, companies can:

For example, using a dashboard connected to data from ServiceNow, an IT manager can track where assets are physically stored in an organisation, which can then be used for tasks such as determining which priority to upgrade hardware. Using such a dashboard, you can easily view all of the computers in maintenance, their model type, their exact location, and how much they cost. In addition to seeing which computers need to be repaired, you can also have insight into which parts need to be ordered, the proximity to computers to one another and the priority as to which computers need to be replaced first.

SnowMirror can be run from servers in your own data infrastructure or on cloud services such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure or the Snowflake database platform. This gives you increased flexibility as well as greater control over how and where your data is stored.

SnowMirror is available for a free trial download which will let you see its benefits firsthand. You can sign up for a trial here. In addition, we’re also happy to arrange a demo and introduction. You can write directly to pavel.muller@snow-mirror.com to arrange a time.

The Snowflake cloud data platform has enjoyed tremendous growth in recent months, and it’s pretty clear why. Snowflake provides a flexible cloud solution that enables companies to pursue a multi-cloud strategy, including a cross-cloud approach to mix and match clouds as users see fit. Snowflake is available globally on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Since October 2019, SnowMirror has also supported Snowflake as a database, in addition to its support for database platforms such as MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, Microsoft SQL and PostgreSQL.

With a common and interchangeable code base, Snowflake delivers advantages such as global data replication, which means you can move your data to any cloud in any region, without having to re-code your applications or learn new skills. A multi-cloud strategy lets companies negotiate rates with cloud providers and maintain cost management through choice and flexibility.

A multi-cloud strategy has other advantages, including letting different business units use the public cloud that best matches their needs and promotes productivity. Companies can also make use of regional footprints to leverage the best cloud provider by region based on presence, capacity, and services for local teams. In addition, using multiple clouds serves as protection against a single cloud provider’s multi-region outage, ensuring uptime and SLA adherence.

SnowMirror supports Snowflake

Because SnowMirror supports Snowflake as a database, companies can now make a replica of their ServiceNow or Salesforce data and have it available for use in multiple regions and clouds; this enables the use of data for business intelligence and reporting as well as having a replica for disaster recovery purposes. With SnowMirror, you can simply replicate ServiceNow data to Snowflake directly without an intermediate staging area. This will ensure that your ServiceNow data is always loaded and updated correctly and that you can automate these processes to focus on getting the best insights.

Another interesting aspect of using Snowflake is that it helps to prevent data silos, which are created as soon as data exists in a public cloud. Because each major cloud provider created a unique offering with proprietary APIs for data management, there’s no easy way to copy or share data from cloud to cloud. Making matters worse, it’s hard to find DevOps employees who have the skillset to work in multiple clouds, which often leads to separate cloud teams within an organisation (yet another silo).

Snowflake bridges this by providing a cloud-agnostic layer and unified data management platform, which sits on top of each cloud region and all cloud infrastructure regardless of which cloud platforms are used. By providing identical functionality across all cloud platforms, the data management platform enables a cost-effective and seamless method to securely share data.

Data must move anywhere easily, which requires a high-throughput communication “mesh” that enables complete data portability.

SnowMirror plays a crucial role in a company’s cloud data replication strategy. By providing a wide spectrum of supported databases and cloud providers – including Snowflake – we give companies both flexibility and increased security

If you’d like to to talk with us about how SnowMirror can help your business get the most out of ServiceNow, get in touch here.