How Comcast replicates ServiceNow data at scale

About the company

Headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Comcast is the world’s second-largest broadcasting and cable television company in the world. Comcast’s ServiceNow footprint has grown considerably over time. It now has more than 20 nodes in its ServiceNow instance, with many of its ServiceNow modules such as CMDB containing more than 40 million records.

The Challenge

Comcast moved to ServiceNow several years ago, and its ServiceNow footprint has grown considerably over time. It now has more than 20 nodes in its ServiceNow instance, and many of its ServiceNow modules such as the CMDB contain more than 40 million records.

In order to make its ServiceNow data accessible for analysis and other purposes, Comcast needed a solution to replicate ServiceNow data to a database they could connect to directly. In addition, Comcast needed to retain large amounts of ServiceNow data generated during events such as outages for later analysis. Other teams at Comcast needed data from ServiceNow and wanted to use it in their own data lakes and warehouses.

The Choice

In 2019, Comcast installed GuideVision’s SnowMirror, a software tool for making smart replications of data from ServiceNow. SnowMirror is part of Infosys ESM Café, a suite of AI-powered solutions designed around best practices that increase ServiceNow performance by 40 to 50 percent.

Comcast chose SnowMirror because of its ease of use and high functionality, even at scale. “I first started exploring tools to get data out of ServiceNow into a database we hosted, so that it could be used for data visualizations and things like that,” explains Steve Zadroga, a senior automation engineer at Comcast.

The Solution

Comcast leverages SnowMirror’s functionality so that it makes calls to each of its 20 ServiceNow nodes. With SnowMirror, ServiceNow data syncs faster than if it was pulling data from the same instance or same node. 

The data replicated from ServiceNow was first stored on-premises, but is now stored in the cloud. Data is replicated multiple times daily, providing near real-time information. Because the data is available in a separate database, it can be used for a number of purposes, including data analysis and reporting using tools such as PowerBI and Tableau, or combined with other sources into data lakes.

The Results

Because Comcast is now able to replicate its ServiceNow data, the uses are numerous. These include reporting, data retention and making data available to other teams. Comcast can easily use tools such as Tableau and PowerBI for sophisticated reporting and dashboards that draw on Comcast’s very large data sets synced from ServiceNow without impeding performance.

Interested in learning more about GuideVision and how we can help you with ServiceNow? Feel free to get in touch - we’d love to hear from you.