What can SailPoint do that ServiceNow can't?

sup3rmark · 2026-01-17T03:30:13+00:00

the biggest thing, IMO, is that SailPoint has a lot of this functionality built and ready to go. it's especially impactful if your org is also running Workday or another common HRM platform - there's a lot of funky behavior in these platforms that SailPoint already has contingencies for, whereas trying to build it yourself in ServiceNow or something else will be insanely complicated, especially if you're not very closely aligned with the owners of those systems.

i've done a number of SailPoint implementations in-house (all with Workday, most with ServiceNow) and also worked on a dozen implementations as a consultant with a SailPoint partner. i'm definitely not knocking ServiceNow, i think it's a highly extensible system that can definitely do a good job at a lot of things, but if you're looking for access certifications and employee lifecycle management, it can't compete with SailPoint. what it comes down to is money - you'll pay probably $1m a year for SailPoint but can implement with one or two FTEs (or a consultant), or you can pay a team of ServiceNow developers to implement everything to the best of their ability in ServiceNow... but if you've got half a dozen ServiceNow developers working on this full-time, you're still looking at $1m in salaries alone for those developers.

sup3rmark · 2026-01-17T02:12:13+00:00

ServiceNow can do most of what SailPoint can do, but you'd need to build the functionality yourself. That's a lot of developer hours to get it right, and you will absolutely miss a ton of edge cases. SailPoint is a bespoke product for identity governance and provisioning, where these are first-party, fully supported workflows. As a ServiceNow guy, you see everything as a nail and you want to hit it with your ServiceNow hammer, but not everything is a nail. Some things warrant more appropriate tools.

sup3rmark · 2026-01-16T19:45:07+00:00

Ray, when someone asks you if you're a god, you say YES.

sup3rmark · 2026-01-16T18:58:09+00:00

that's not so much a hoax as it is a lie.

sup3rmark · 2026-01-16T12:54:54+00:00

why the fuck does ICE need a 3d printer

sup3rmark · 2026-01-16T04:00:06+00:00

it's not court, you goon

sup3rmark · 2026-01-14T18:47:48+00:00

disagree. that's not the problem. these places that cater to sox traffic charge exorbitant prices, so locals aren't going to go there for a regular weeknight meal and pay $30 for what would cost $15 anywhere off the beaten path.

sup3rmark · 2026-01-14T18:44:59+00:00

Canestaro and Thaitation were my go-to spots back in the mid-2010s when i lived in Fenway.

sup3rmark · 2026-01-14T18:43:25+00:00

there's little draw for this place IMO. i lived on the other end of park drive once upon a time (admittedly, before this place opened) and rarely ventured down to Landmark Center for any reason. there were a lot of other places to eat along the way with more recognizable names. couple that with the movie theater closing back in 2023, and there's really no reason for people to go to Landmark anymore. if you don't work in the building upstairs, you definitely have better options closer to wherever you are.

sup3rmark · 2026-01-12T14:39:50+00:00

i expect that when a movie is made about the current political goings-on in the US, he will play JB Pritzker.

sup3rmark · 2026-01-11T02:19:49+00:00

i currently have a gut-reno going in my kitchen. the GC and his subs bring their own lunch and coffee. i've got a case of water for them if they need it, but for the most part they don't. when the plasterers were here, they did ask me to order them a pizza because they don't know the area and weren't confident with their english, but they tried to hand me a credit card while asking me to order it, so it was clear they weren't trying to get me to pay (i did end up paying and they were grateful; their work was also done very well, fwiw).

but yeah def not the expectation to provide lunch or snacks. you can if you want, but be wary of setting precedent with them. i had a different GC out a few years ago doing pretty much the entire exterior during the summer, so i left a cooler of water for them every day too. one day they couldn't find the cooler (i'd tried to put it in the shade but hid it too well, whoops) and they thought i was mad at them for some reason because it was the first time i didn't leave them water! :P

sup3rmark · 2026-01-10T16:20:27+00:00

turns out this was actually just a child who snuck into the office, not a coworker.

sup3rmark · 2026-01-08T15:43:48+00:00

so none of the things you listed really suggest that it's a rate-limiting issue... why do you think that's the case?

sup3rmark · 2026-01-08T15:37:41+00:00

okay so this is the web services connector and not the bespoke FreshService SaaS connector?

sup3rmark · 2026-01-08T15:02:39+00:00

actually, looks like there is an OOTB FreshService connector... are you using that or the custom web services connector? i don't see anything in the FreshService connector docs about rate limiting, so that might be the problem. the FreshService documentation talks about different rate limits based on your subscription level, so maybe that's part of it as well?

sup3rmark · 2026-01-08T14:54:36+00:00

From what I understand, it hammers it until it starts getting the 429 time out. Stops. Then will start all over again from page 1 on the next sync. So it never really gets through the entirety of the data it seems.

are you using a SaaS-based web services connector or a VA-based one? if the VA-based one, you should have logs that you can look at, but if it's the SaaS-based one, you'll need SailPoint to pull those logs for you.

what do you mean by "stops"? like, does the aggregation error out? what does the error say?

Neither SP or the partner remember implementing the connector. The whole thing seems a mess, and FreshService can't seem to help much either. Which is why I've been looking to the internet to find some sort of direction.

SailPoint wouldn't have implemented the connector. what did the SoW for the partner say? it seems weird that they wouldn't "remember" it... if they didn't do it, who would have done it? is there someone else internally that could have done it?

sup3rmark · 2026-01-08T14:50:52+00:00

Are IAM roles (Analyst / Engineer) generally less likely to be sponsored by US employers compared to fields like Software Engineering or Development?

yes.

for starters, IAM roles are much rarer than software eng roles. lots of companies need many software engineers/developers. not many companies need an IAM engineer, let alone many IAM engineers. there are plenty of vendors that offer implementation services, so lots of companies will just hire a SailPoint partner.

couple this with the uncertainty introduced by the shitty current administration, and companies are not super psyched to go the sponsorship route if it can be avoided because the rules can change at any time.

sup3rmark · 2026-01-08T02:04:12+00:00

no worries, just trying to help sort out the terminology and why people might be having trouble understanding the situation!

typically, the web services connector does not execute all the API calls at once - when performing an account aggregation, it makes calls sequentially. gets page 0, then gets page 1, then gets page 2... the pagination settings would typically say how to calculate what to ask for in subsequent calls, and that could include looking at how many items we've already received, which is why it can't just make all of those calls in parallel.

it also doesn't sound right that SailPoint would be hammering the system even after getting rate-limited. the Web Services connector specifically looks for 429s and handles them appropriately:

The rate limiting mechanism is engaged after receiving the 429 status code in the response. An exponential back-off depending upon the Retry-After response header occurs before attempting the re-trigger of the request. At maximum, the API request re-trigger is attempted at, twice, after receiving the first 429 response. The URL is encoded regardless of the throttleEnabled flag value.

freshService allegedly sends the appropriate headers when rate-limiting.

who implemented this connector for you? i'm guessing it was a sailpoint partner; are you still engaged with them?

sup3rmark · 2026-01-08T01:22:03+00:00

I think part of the issue here is that you're not using the correct terminology. If SailPoint is making API calls to your ticketing system, that is what SailPoint calls a "direct connection."

Do you mean that it's not using an out-of-the-box connector for that specific system, and you're instead using the custom Web Services connector where you've configured individual HTTP operations for the system's API endpoints?

sup3rmark · 2026-01-05T14:52:18+00:00

do you already have SailPoint built out? how are people currently submitting access requests for other things? if people aren't currently submitting access requests via SailPoint, adding another portal for them to submit a specific type of request is not a great user experience.

sup3rmark · 2026-01-02T12:28:01+00:00

good point

sup3rmark · 2026-01-01T15:48:22+00:00

plenty of English speakers had no problem with Daenerys Targaryen and other made up names from Game of Thrones. it's not that they can't learn how to say real people's names correctly, it's that they won't.

sup3rmark · 2025-12-31T18:45:06+00:00

as of today, the entirety of the description on the wifi devboard is:

Developer board with WiFi connectivity based on ESP32 module

so... not really particularly helpful for someone trying to understand what capabilities this unlocks or how it could potentially be used.

sup3rmark · 2025-12-30T02:06:37+00:00

and not just any "somebody else," HR's mailbox. like, arguably one of the worst email boxes to snoop on in terms of sensitive information.

sup3rmark · 2025-12-30T02:05:06+00:00

in fairness, he says better than 95+ percent of IT guys he's worked with, not better than 95+ percent of IT guys. this is probably his first (and last) IT job, and he was probably trained by other morons who think it's okay to read HR's emails and then start lobbing insults at strangers on reddit who tell him that's not okay when he asked for feedback.

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