Exploring Subscription Management

  • Release version: Washingtondc
  • Updated February 1, 2024
  • 3 minutes to read
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    Summary of Exploring Subscription Management

    Subscription Management provides a comprehensive solution to track and manage product subscriptions effectively. It offers a consolidated view of entitlements, enabling users to proactively oversee subscriptions, ensuring compliance, and avoiding unexpected costs.

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    Key Features

    • Real-time Visibility: Access up-to-date entitlement data for informed decision-making.
    • User Management: Instance admins can allocate per-user subscriptions and map custom tables and applications to enhance subscription usage.
    • Approval Workflows: Create subscription approval workflows for security and financial compliance.
    • Monitoring Tools: Track subscription usage patterns, including over-allocated subscriptions and application popularity.

    Key Outcomes

    • Enhanced control over product subscriptions and applications.
    • Informed purchasing decisions based on insights into usage and allocations.
    • Improved compliance by monitoring subscription usage over time.
    • Ability to manage and rectify over-allocated subscriptions effectively.

    For further learning, customers can explore additional resources on configuration, managing subscriptions, and monitoring capacity within Subscription Management.

    Learn how Subscription Management helps you track and manage your product subscriptions and their applications.

    Subscription Management Overview

    Subscription Management gives you an accurate, consolidated view of your entitlements where you can proactively manage your subscriptions.
    • Gain visibility and control of your product subscriptions and their applications.
    • Access a real‑time view of your entitlement data.
    • Maximize subscription usage and make informed decisions about purchases by viewing insights.
    • Stay in compliance and avoid unexpected costs by tracking subscription usage and allocations over time.

    Subscription Management users

    Table 1. Users
    User Description
    Instance admin The instance admin allocates per-user subscriptions by adding groups to a product subscription. The instance admin maps custom tables and custom applications to subscriptions with available entitlements to maximize subscription usage and stay in compliance.

    Subscription Management workflow

    This infographic shows a sample end-to-end workflow of how different users in an organization work together to purchase, allocate, and manage subscriptions.

    Figure 1. Managing subscriptions
    Different users in an organization work together to purchase, allocate, and manage subscriptions. View the steps after the infographic for details.

    In this workflow:

    1. The chief information officer or service owner works with the ServiceNow platform owner to purchase new subscriptions.
    2. After the purchase is complete, the platform owner views the products and applications in Impact.
    3. The instance admin views the new product subscriptions in Subscription Management on the production instance. For more information, see Product subscriptions overview.
    4. The instance admin performs the following tasks in Subscription Management:
    5. If the organization requires security approvals before adding users to groups or financial approvals before subscriptions are allocated to users, the instance admin works with group managers to create subscription approval workflows that determine who gets a subscription when new users are added to groups.
    6. The instance admin monitors subscription usage to stay in compliance and make informed decisions on future purchases, consistently monitoring the following data:
      • Over-allocated subscriptions
      • Unmapped custom applications and tables
      • Usage patterns over time
      • Application popularity
      • Custom table usage

    Subscription Management benefits

    Benefit Feature User
    Fix over-allocated subscriptions Insights Instance admin
    View unallocated subscriptions Insights Instance admin
    Allocate available subscriptions using recommended groups Allocate subscriptions Instance admin
    Map global custom tables to a product subscription Issues Instance admin
    Map custom applications to a product subscription Issues Instance admin
    View a summary of subscription allocations Subscription details Instance admin
    View subscription allocation details over time Subscription details Instance admin
    View custom table usage over time Subscription details Instance admin

    What to explore next

    To learn more about configuring and using Subscription Management, see: