David McDonald

Tech enthusiasm from down-under

  • Recent posts

  • Thumbnail
    How to Revert Forms & Lists Back to Baseline in ServiceNow
    Published 22 Apr 2026
    You're looking at a form in ServiceNow, and it's a malformed horror from years of customisation. ServiceNow flags it as a skipped update with every upgrade. You want to revert it back to how it was out-of-the-box but you don't know how. Here's a guide on how to revert form layouts, list layouts, and related lists back to baseline in ServiceNow.
  • Thumbnail
    How to Revert a Record Back to Baseline in ServiceNow
    Published 21 Apr 2026
    You're looking at some business rules that have been butchered beyond recognition. Upgrades have skipped it for years, and it's causing issues. You want to revert them back to baseline, back to how it was out-of-the-box, but how do you do it? Here's a guide on how to revert a record back to baseline in ServiceNow.
  • Thumbnail
    CI Operational Status vs Install Status in the CMDB
    Published 21 Feb 2026
    You want to set the Status of a CI in the ServiceNow CMDB, but you find a handful of different fields with Status in the name. Operational Status, Install Status, Hardware Status, Life Cycle Stage... It's not always clear which one you should be using just by looking at them. Here's which one you should use, and what all the other Status fields mean.
  • Thumbnail
    CI Fields - Environment vs Used For vs Classification
    Published 21 Feb 2026
    So you want to mark a Server in the ServiceNow CMDB as a DEV or a TEST server. At first glance, there's 3 different fields you could use: Environment, Used For, and Classification. Here's a guide on which one to use and why.
  • Thumbnail
    How to Report from a Multi Row Variable Set
    Published 07 Sep 2025
    Multi Row Variable Sets in ServiceNow are great way of easily collecting rows of data on a catalog form, but they can be a challenge if you want to do any reporting or filtering on the data within. Here's a guide on how to report on data in a Multi Row Variable Set.
  • Thumbnail
    Better SN Approvals #5 - Mandatory Reject Reason
    Published 16 May 2025
    Getting your approval request rejected without any reason feels terrible. Why was it rejected? What should I change? Did I miss something? Here's some ways to force approvers to provide a reason when they are rejecting an approval request in ServiceNow.
  • Thumbnail
    How to find the services a CI supports
    Published 24 Mar 2025
    So you've got a CI in ServiceNow, but you have no idea what services it supports. If you reboot that server, who's going to angrily knock on your door? There's a few ways in ServiceNow to find out, let's have a look at them.
  • Thumbnail
    What does subscribing to a CI do anyway?
    Published 19 Mar 2025
    I keep looking at the "Subscribe" button on the CI form thinking "what do you do anyway?". There's not a lot of documentation around what it does, so I reverse engineered it and here's what I found.
  • Thumbnail
    DIY Datalogger For My Solar Panels - Part 2
    Published 10 Mar 2025
    The journey continues as I try to make a DIY my own data logger for my home's solar inverter. I haven't finished it, but I've made some big steps.
  • View more posts...
About me

I'm David McDonald, an Australian with a taste for:

  • Software development
  • Electronic engineering
  • The nerdy lifestyle

My career focus is in the ServiceNow platform, but I'm also interested in C#, web design, and C++ for programming Arduinos in my spare time.