By Ron Browning, CEO, Dyna Software Inc.
If ServiceNow is at the center of how your organization runs, then the tools you use to enhance and grow that platform are no longer a back-office concern. Your DevOps tooling is part of your risk posture, your ability to innovate, and, if we’re honest, the size of your future upgrade bill.
I say that having lived this from three different angles. I used to own the ServiceNow platform inside a few enterprises. After that, I spent years as a consultant helping organizations rescue or realign their implementations. Today, I build software that helps customers manage and govern ServiceNow at scale. Across all of those roles, one pattern has stayed remarkably consistent: not all DevOps software is created equal, and the wrong choice can quietly lock in years of cost and complexity.
So this isn’t a theoretical piece. It’s the list I wish someone had handed me before I signed off on DevOps tools in my own ServiceNow environments.
When someone pitches me a DevOps tool, the first question I like to ask is simple: Does this solution keep my ServiceNow data on the ServiceNow platform, or does it reside somewhere else?
In my consulting days, this was usually where the architectural conversation began, especially with customers in regulated industries. But even outside banking and healthcare, it’s just good practice. From a ServiceNow platform governance perspective, where the DevOps data lives directly impacts security, compliance exposure, and long-term upgrade risk.
The more your configuration, code, and operational data leave ServiceNow for third-party tools, the more you expand your security, compliance, and privacy attack surface. One platform to secure is easier than five. One system of record for who has access to what is easier to reason about than a patchwork of tools. And the fewer times you have to ask, “Where, exactly, is this data stored?” the better.
This is why I’m such a fan of on-platform DevOps and governance tools. Specifically, solutions built natively on ServiceNow that work directly with your tables, ACLs, roles, and security model. They don’t need to export sensitive information into an external SaaS tool just to do their job. They also don’t need additional APIs or eat into my custom table count. They can often take advantage of the licenses and capabilities you’re already paying for.
That doesn’t mean off-platform tools have no place. However, you must make certain going off-platform makes sense for the benefit versus the risk you are after.
When I became more deeply involved in consulting in the ServiceNow ecosystem, I noticed that every partner and non-ServiceNow product had its own idea of “ServiceNow best practice.” Most of those ideas come from experience on other platforms or generic coding. Some of them were good, and others clever. However, some also created major headaches when clients eventually tried to align with what ServiceNow itself recommends.
Fast forward to today. The platform has matured. ServiceNow has been very clear about its own standards. The Common Service Data Model (CSDM) is the obvious example; there’s now a prescribed way to think about services, CMDB, and relationships. On top of that, there are defined patterns for development, integrations, upgrades, and enterprise-scale use. These aren’t just suggestions on a presentation slide anymore. They’re the gravitational center of the ecosystem’s evolution.
This matters when you’re choosing DevOps software. You need tools that speak ServiceNow’s language: CSDM, CMDB, update sets, scoped apps, Store apps, and so on. Misalignment with CSDM and CMDB standards increases upgrade complexity and can introduce other problems. You’ll benefit from using something that reinforces ServiceNow’s own best practices standards, not something that quietly introduces its own definition of “best practice” that conflicts with them.
Does that mean you shouldn’t have your own best practices? Absolutely not. You should. Every organization has its own risk tolerance, culture, and way of working. But your local standards should sit on top of a solid alignment with ServiceNow’s best practices, not conflict with it. When a DevOps toolset comes with its own unaligned model baked in, I believe it deserves some serious scrutiny.
One of the more painful lessons many platform owners encounter is that customization itself is not the real villain. The real danger is being surprised by a ServiceNow upgrade risk that is introduced when ServiceNow changes something (for example, an enhancement or a fix) that conflicts with your customization.
ServiceNow never stands still. There are constant releases of fixes, patches, new features, and new products. Older capabilities either evolve or get deprecated. That’s a good thing. This is how the platform stays modern, but it also means that whatever you’ve built has a moving backdrop behind it.
If your DevOps tooling doesn’t help you connect the dots between what ServiceNow is changing and what you’ve built, you end up in a reactive mode and possibly unplanned outages. For example, implementing a patchwork of short-term workarounds that are never revisited later on. Something may break in a heavily customized area, or a new product isn’t turning on as it would when it’s “out of the box”.
At that point, teams then scramble to figure out what changed and what it touched. Projects then get delayed, business demand goes unmet, and everyone loses sleep going back to focus on past work rather than new innovation. All of that is expensive, impacts executive accountability on multiple levels (budget, delivery timelines, etc.), but importantly, much of it is preventable.
That’s why I place so much value on tools that bring ServiceNow’s support and release intelligence directly to the people doing the work. Imagine your developers and platform owners being able to see HI Support known errors, release notes, and deprecation notices in the context of your configuration. Imagine being able to quickly see where your scripts, customizations, or patterns overlap with known issues and upcoming product roadmap changes. Imagine having a prioritized list of “what we need to fix or refactor before the next upgrade,” rather than discovering those items the hard way in production and after it’s too late.
The goal is not to eliminate customization. The goal is to eliminate the surprises.
Let me be candid on this point: I have seen some beautiful DevOps demos that did not survive contact with reality. This is especially common in multi-team, or multi-vendor ServiceNow delivery models.
On paper and in a controlled demo environment, the features looked fantastic. But once we tried to embed those tools into a real ServiceNow delivery model (with internal teams, external vendors, and business stakeholders all in the mix), the friction showed up quickly. The tools become hard to fit into an end-to-end DevOps cycle. There are gaps that force manual workarounds or awkward process changes, while integrations with key process areas like Change, Release, Incident, Problem, CMDB, and SPM become shallow or missing outright.
When we unpack why this is happening, a common theme often emerges: the people building the tools don’t have much experience actually owning and operating ServiceNow at scale. They are bringing generic DevOps ideas into the platform, rather than designing with practical experience of how ServiceNow works in large organizations.
The result is a piecemeal DevOps approach on the ServiceNow platform. A feature here for code promotion, a report there for quality. Maybe a script for testing somewhere else. But it’s nothing that actually provides a coherent, end-to-end view of how changes should move from idea to production and into ongoing platform health. It also doesn’t align with and leverage the native process capabilities and maturity that the ServiceNow platform ships with.
So, when you evaluate DevOps software, don’t stop at the feature checklist. Ask who built it and what their relationship with ServiceNow has been. Ask whether the toolset can realistically support your whole DevOps lifecycle (from design and development through testing, release, deployment, and ongoing governance) or whether it will leave you stitching pieces together by hand. Ask whether it will make your existing processes smoother, or whether your teams will have to contort their ways of working to accommodate the tool.
The best scenario is one where you have a toolset that fits the lived reality of ServiceNow delivery, not one that forces your people into someone else’s theoretical model.
In my early consulting years, I earned a lot of income from work that, frankly, should have been automated. Tasks like upgrade impact analysis, CMDB and CSDM alignment, hunting down risky configurations and dependencies, or writing long-form guidance for developers on how to fix problematic configurations or code.
Today, we are finally at the point where AI-enabled DevOps software can take on a meaningful share of that work. Not as a gimmick or a bullet point on a presentation slide, but as a practical, everyday helper. AI-enabled DevOps for ServiceNow should be treated no differently.
When you look at DevOps options, I encourage you to take AI seriously and be demanding about what the term “AI-enabled” actually means. The most useful tools are deeply connected to the ServiceNow context. They understand your tables, configurations, customizations, and standards. They can analyze upgrade impact, patterns, and technical debt reduction opportunities at scale and provide concrete, actionable guidance to your developers and admins, rather than waving a vague “this looks risky” flag. But more importantly, you must be on the lookout for reasoning and contextual capabilities. Your ServiceNow instance might have the same applications and application suites as your next-door neighbor, but I can promise you, your configuration is uniquely your own. Without context and reasoning, tools may provide generic ServiceNow instance “help”, but it won’t be what you what you really need.
When done well, AI-enabled and deeply connected DevOps tools can shorten upgrade cycles, reduce your reliance on a small group of platform gurus, catch issues before they become outages, and turn years of tribal knowledge into more repeatable practices. The catch is that absorbing AI into your operating model is not trivial. So look for tools that make it easy for teams to adopt AI in the flow of their day-to-day work, rather than adding yet another dashboard nobody logs into.
There’s one last point I must emphasize, especially if you own or architect a ServiceNow platform. Don’t just evaluate the product; evaluate the platform and the company behind it.
The ServiceNow ecosystem has undergone significant change over the last seven to ten years. Vendors have been acquired, and products have been sunset. Some partners have lost focus on evolving their product value and shifted to just making the sale. We’ve all seen shiny tools that demo and impress at first, but fail to keep adding new value through features and enhancements.
Meanwhile, ServiceNow itself has continued to expand and harden. It has always had the potential to carry an organization well into the future. Your DevOps tooling needs to grow and adapt alongside it and should be an ever-growing source of value to your ServiceNow platform health, as well as delivery.
So, as you look at DevOps vendors, ask whether they are truly focused on helping you reach your outcomes and goals. Ask whether they have a clear roadmap that lines up with your expectations of growing value, especially around AI and platform governance. Ask whether they show up as a partner that challenges your thinking and helps shape your operating model, or whether they’re just trying to close a transaction.
In my view, the best DevOps software vendors in the ServiceNow space behave like extensions of your platform team. They’re more invested in your long-term success than in your first purchase order.
ServiceNow is no longer “just” a ticketing system or a workflow engine. For many organizations, it has become a strategic platform that shapes how work happens across IT, HR, customer operations, and more. That means the ServiceNow DevOps tools you choose aren’t small technical preferences, but a strategic governance and risk decision that will influence how fast and safely you can move for years to come.
My perspective, after wearing the hats of platform owner, consultant, and now vendor, is straightforward:
And above all, pick a vendor who behaves like a partner in your outcomes, not just a supplier.
Whether you’re just beginning your DevOps journey on ServiceNow or carefully unwinding the consequences of earlier decisions, it’s worth taking a deliberate look at your governance options. Your choices will tie directly to executive accountability for metrics like cost, resilience, performance, and more.
The bottom line is simple: A little extra thought now is almost always cheaper than a full rebuild later.
Ready to have a conversation about your platform governance tools? Contact us to speak with our experts or to schedule a demo of GuardRails.
