ServiceNow ITOM subscription units are the capacity meter ServiceNow uses to bill its IT Operations Management products. ServiceNow names ten products billed under this method: ITOM Visibility, ITOM Discovery, ITOM AIOps, Health Log Analytics, ITOM Optimization, ITOM Cloud Accelerate, Service Reliability Management, SLO Management, Service Observability and synthetic monitoring.[1] Each product counts the licensable resources it works with. The resources are assigned to CI categories, and the count in each category is converted into Subscription Units. A unit “may cover a different number of resources, depending on the resource CI category”, and “the customer contract for your organization determines the CI categories from the available options, and also the ratios of CI allocation for subscription units in each CI category”.[1] The unit is therefore not a node or server license in the traditional sense. It is a contractual exchange rate applied to a rolling average of configuration items (CIs).
Editions
ITOM is sold as individual products (a la carte), as a bundle covering several products, or as a combination of the two.[3] ServiceNow’s current package page lists an ITOM Advanced package (Discovery, Service Mapping, Certificate Inventory and Management, AI Agent Topology Mapping, API Insights, Cloud Account Management and related capabilities) and an ITOM Prime package that adds Event Management, Metric Intelligence, Health Log Analytics, Service Observability, Service Reliability Management and Synthetic Monitoring.[12] The older ITOM Pro bundle appears in the documentation’s worked examples.[5]
The products count different things:
| Product | What is counted for licensing |
|---|---|
| ITOM Visibility | CIs found in horizontal and top-down discovery, plus CIs that Service Graph Connectors populate in the CMDB[1] |
| ITOM Discovery | An entry-level “subset” of Visibility: CIs found by Discovery and brought in by Service Graph Connectors[1] |
| ITOM AIOps | CIs “where it captures alerts, events, and metric data”, across all CI categories[1] |
| Health Log Analytics | CIs based on log data from licensable resource types. The count is also reflected in ITOM AIOps, so an ITOM AIOps subscription is needed as well[1] |
| ITOM Cloud Accelerate | CIs managed or monitored by Cloud Migration Assessment, Cloud Configuration Governance or Cloud Action Library, with duplicates removed[1] |
| Digital End-User Experience | Computers where any DEX feature is active, with duplicates across features removed[10] |
Operational Technology Management uses the same licensing module. Its license types are identified by an SKU Type value of otm, and “the same license options available for IT Operations Management are also available for OTM”.[11]
Metrics
The meter is the Subscription Unit. The License Report form defines the ratio as the “Number of CIs, in a specific category that need a subscription, that are counted as one Subscription Unit. SU ratio is determined by your customer contract” (ITOM Subscription Unit ratio is the number of CIs per unit set by contract).[2] The current documentation lists nine CI categories: Containers, PaaS, FaaS, Servers, Unresolved Monitored Object, Unclassed category, End User Devices, IoT and Customer Prem Devices.[1] Containers, platform-as-a-service and function-as-a-service resources are listed as categories separate from Servers, and each category takes its own contractual ratio.
DEX is the one ITOM-family product for which the documentation publishes a ratio. “A SU is a unit of measure applied to Managed IT Resources using Defined Ratios.” For DEX the resource is an end-user computing (EUC) device, and “The SU to EUC device ratio is 1:4. For example, 1,000 SUs = 4,000 EUCs” (DEX Subscription Units cover end-user computing devices at a 1:4 ratio).[10]
Counting / floors
The 90-day average
ITOM consumption is a rolling average rather than a peak. The ITOM Licensing Aggregator Store scheduled job “calculates the average of daily CI counts for the last 90 days” (ITOM CI counts are averaged over the last 90 daily counts).[7] On the License Report, Total Count is the “Average of 90 daily counts of CIs categorized by CI types, within each ITOM application” when the Aggregated filter is true. When Aggregated is false it shows a single day’s count.[2] Total Subscription Units Consumed is calculated by applying the ratio to the CI count in each category.[2]
A worked illustration with hypothetical figures: if a contract set 1 unit per server and 1 unit per 4 containers, and the 90-day averages were 1,200 servers and 2,000 containers, consumption would be 1,200 + 500 = 1,700 units. The ratios in this example are invented. ServiceNow’s product documentation publishes none for ITOM.
Separate scheduled jobs produce each product’s daily count and CI list: Visibility, Discovery, AIOps, Optimization, Cloud Accelerate, DEX, Service Observability and their OTM equivalents. A dedicated job “calculates the node count used in Event Management” (Event Management node count is calculated by a separate scheduled job).[7] The dashboard shows daily raw resource counts, which include all detected resources before they are sorted into specific CIs, next to the 90-day consumption averages.[9] Administrators with sn_itom_license.reader can generate the list of currently countable CIs per application. That list “is closely correlated to the latest daily CI count” but may differ if CIs changed since the last count.[8]
Bundles and a la carte subscriptions
A bundle gives every covered application its own allowance. “When you purchase subscriptions in a bundle, you receive an equal number of subscription units for all ITOM applications covered by that bundle” (An ITOM bundle grants equal Subscription Units to each covered application).[4] A 500-unit bundle covering ITOM Visibility and ITOM AIOps therefore gives 500 units to each, and unused AIOps units cannot absorb Visibility overuse. “The consumption level of the bundle is determined by the highest usage among the products included in the bundle” (ITOM bundle consumption equals the highest usage of any covered application), and “You can only purchase one bundle at a time” (Only one ITOM bundle can be purchased at a time).[4] On the Subscriptions form, the Allocated value of a bundle shows the highest consumption among its applications. If ITOM Visibility used 300 units and ITOM AIOps 200, the form shows 300. The colour threshold defaults to 90 percent, and red means the purchased units are overdrawn (ITOM bundle Allocated shows the highest application consumption, with a 90 percent threshold).[6]
When an application is covered by both a bundle and an a la carte subscription, “the licensing module deducts from the bundle first. It then deducts from the individually purchased subscriptions” (ITOM usage deducts from the bundle first, then from a la carte).[5] Overuse beyond both is shown as an overdraft of the a la carte subscription. Overuse by an application that only the bundle covers is shown as an overdraft of the bundle (ITOM overdrafts show on the a la carte subscription or, if none, on the bundle).[5] ServiceNow’s example has ITOM AIOps consuming 860 units against 500 bundle units and 250 a la carte units, so the a la carte subscription is flagged. ITOM Visibility consumes 550 units with no a la carte purchase, so the ITOM Pro bundle is flagged.[5]
flowchart LR
A["Daily CI counts per product"] --> B["90-day average per CI category"]
B --> C["Divide by contract ratio"]
C --> D["Subscription Units consumed"]
D --> E{"Covered by bundle?"}
E -- yes --> F["Deduct from bundle"]
F --> G{"Bundle exhausted?"}
G -- yes --> H["Deduct from a la carte, or show bundle overdrawn"]
E -- no --> H
No published floor
The ITOM documents set no minimum purchase. Additional units can be bought for a bundle or for individual products when consumption exceeds the estimate.[3]
Virtualization & partitioning
Virtual machines, containers and cloud resources are not licensed through host or core rules. They are counted as CIs in whichever category the licensing module assigns them to, such as Servers, Containers, PaaS or FaaS, at the contracted ratio.[1] The documentation publishes no rule under which licensing a host covers its guests, and none that caps container counts per host.
Cloud / BYOL
ITOM bundles “also provide entitlement to Integration Hub to select spokes and protocols” and to Workflow Data Fabric for select spokes and protocols. ITOM Cloud Accelerate needs an additional Integration Hub Enterprise bundle entitlement, and an additional Workflow Data Fabric Enterprise bundle entitlement when Cloud Action Library is used from outside the Cloud Accelerate applications. Cloud Account Management requires the Cloud Governance Suite SKU.[3] ITOM Visibility includes limited Tag Governance for on-premises resources.[1]
Programs
The purchasing options are summarized under ITOM bundle and a la carte subscriptions. No other ITOM-specific program is published.
Out of scope
- The contractual CI-per-unit ratios for ITOM categories. These are in the ITOM Subscription Unit Overview legal schedule and the Order Form, not in product documentation.
- The detailed counting logic in Now Support KB0748149, which the component documentation refers to.
- Hardware Asset Management Subscription Units, which count asset records rather than CIs (see ServiceNow user and subscription-unit licensing).
- List prices for ITOM packages (not published).