Hi there,
Big change you've seen or even had to deal with the official ServiceNow HealthScan Scorecard at customers. The "ServiceNow HealthScan Scorecard provides an automated review of an instance". The PDF document optionally is accompanied with an Excel file pointing to all findings in detail.
While I'm not a fan of the HealthScan at all, I do feel the need to dive into some of the findings and share learnings I encounter at every single customer. In a few articles I will try to give a bit of explanation on findings, what you can do to solve them, and perhaps what you can do to prevent them in the first place. Some of the findings are solid gold, some of them are…
The first articles in this series will be a bit cherry picking, and then slowly progressing to more complex or time-consuming findings. Starting with the easy to solve findings to improve scores quickly and with minimal effort. Scores that often people in decision making places are sensitive to. Later on diving into more complex or time consuming findings, which are way more interesting for genuine developers.
Topics in this series of articles (I will update this section when publishing new articles):
- Update Sets should be named uniquely
- Use Notification Categories
- Populate Knowledge Base articles fully
- Report shared with a group which has no users
- Differs from baseline
- ...
HealthScan
"ServiceNow HealthScan Scorecard provides an automated review of an instance, to better understand instance health. HealthScan Scorecard uses a pre- defined library of best practice called definitions to inspect the instance. Only aggregated information is collected during this inspection scan, which is then analysed and compared. Details such as script names are not collected. The scores reflect alignment to the ServiceNow best practices, and give a high level summary only."
"ServiceNow HealthScan Scorecard is a high level overview of instance health. To get more detailed information, including advice on remediation, please contact the ServiceNow Customer Outcomes team who can advise you of options."
Use Notification Categories
One of the definitions within the "Manageability" category concerns "Use Notification Categories". ServiceNow explains this definition as:
"Improve the identification and management of notifications by associating a notification category with every email notification."
Out-of-the-box, on new Notifications the default value for the Category field is set to Uncategorized". The value that causes this finding. This is an easy overlooked field on the Notification form, and not having a visual queue that might draw attention to the developer to change the value of this field purposely. It could also be that there is no good existing Category available (for example for a new Custom Application). In such a case a developer can simply add a new Category.
Identifying findings
The optional detailed Excel file provided with the ServiceNow HealthScan Scorecard will list all records identified as findings for this definition. Also links are included that take you to the findings in your instance directly.
How ServiceNow exactly determines the findings, I can't tell. Those details are not shared. What I can imagine though:
- Records in table Notification [sysevent_email_action]
- With a query like:
-- Category is Uncategorized
-- Active is true
If you do not have the detailed Excel file, you could identify Notifications that have the Uncategorized Category value in multiple ways. From a list, background script, or my first go to: Instance Scan 😀.
Table Check
One advantage of using a Table Check is that a Table Check ignores out-of-the-box records.
Resolving findings
Having all findings available, we can start working on resolving them. How to resolve them depends a bit on your situation and your process. When it only concerns a hundred findings, you might solve them within 15 minutes by manually updating the value of the Category field. And as mentioned were no good existing Category available, a developer can simply add a new Category.
Since this is development, do apply this on your development instance and promote it up to higher instances.
Preventing findings
Now we can identify and resolve the findings… how about actually preventing new occurrences in the first place? Since the default value of the Category field is the rootcause of these findings, why not change the default value?
Out-of-the-box there is a bit of JavaScript applied on the default value of the Category field, I would suggest just clearing the default value completely.
In addition, you might want to prevent developers to select the Uncategorized Category as well. If you agree on that, you could extend the Reference qual condition with "Name is not Uncategorized".
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That's it. Hope this helps you identifying, resolving, and preventing HealthScan findings. If any questions or remarks, let me know!
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Kind regards,
Mark Roethof
Independent ServiceNow Consultant
10x ServiceNow MVP
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