SERVICENOW & ITSM
GLOSSARY.
Every term you are expected to define out loud in a ServiceNow interview — with the one-sentence definition, a concrete example from the platform, and what the interviewer is really testing. Each term has its own page you can link or bookmark.
ITSM
- IncidentAn Incident is an unplanned interruption or reduction in quality of an IT service, tracked on the incident table so service can be restored as fast as possible.
- ProblemA Problem is the record that tracks the underlying cause of one or more incidents, so the fault can be removed permanently instead of repeatedly worked around.
- Change RequestA Change Request is a controlled record for adding, modifying or removing anything that could affect a live IT service, carrying risk assessment, approvals and an implementation window.
- SLA (Service Level Agreement)An SLA is a committed target — such as resolve a P1 within four hours — enforced in ServiceNow by an SLA Definition that attaches a timer to a task and tracks elapsed, remaining and breached time.
CMDB
- Configuration Item (CI)A Configuration Item is any component you need to manage in order to deliver an IT service — a server, an application, a laptop, a service — stored on cmdb_ci or one of its extended class tables.
- CMDBThe CMDB (Configuration Management Database) is the set of related tables that record the CIs in your environment and the relationships between them, acting as the single source of truth for service context.
- DiscoveryDiscovery is ServiceNow's agentless process that scans networks through a MID Server, identifies devices and applications, and creates or updates the matching CIs in the CMDB.
- CSDMCSDM (Common Service Data Model) is ServiceNow's prescriptive blueprint for how to model services, applications and infrastructure so every product on the platform reads the same data the same way.
Platform
- Update SetAn Update Set is a bundle of configuration changes captured on one instance so they can be previewed and committed on another — the standard way to move work from dev to test to production.
- Scoped ApplicationA Scoped Application is an app with its own namespace (for example x_acme_hr) that isolates its tables, scripts and artifacts from other applications and restricts what outside code can touch.
- ACL (Access Control)An ACL (Access Control rule) grants or denies an operation — create, read, write, delete — on a table, a field or a record, based on required roles, a condition and an optional script that sets the answer variable.
Automation
- Business RuleA Business Rule is server-side script that runs when a record is queried, inserted, updated or deleted, timed as before, after, async or display.
- GlideRecordGlideRecord is the server-side ServiceNow API for querying, inserting, updating and deleting records, walking results row by row through query() and next().
- GlideAjaxGlideAjax is the client-side API for calling a Client Callable Script Include asynchronously, so a form can fetch server data without a page reload.
- Flow DesignerFlow Designer is ServiceNow's low-code automation builder where a trigger plus a sequence of reusable actions replaces the legacy Workflow Editor.
Integration
- MID ServerA MID Server is a lightweight Java application installed inside the customer network that lets the ServiceNow instance reach systems it cannot contact directly, used by Discovery, Orchestration and internal integrations.
- Scripted REST APIA Scripted REST API is a custom inbound web service that exposes /api/<namespace>/<api-id>/<resource>, where your server script reads the request and builds the response.
Turn definitions into answers
Knowing the word is step one; the technical round asks you to use it. Run the drills and the role-by-role question hub.