Hi everyone,
I’ve been working with ServiceNow for nearly 13 years (since Aspen) and, like most of you, I’ve spent way too much time juggling tabs, waiting on slow queries, debugging ACL's, and trying to piece together what went wrong.
A few months back I started building a Chrome extension to fix that. It's now a full admin toolkit: system health, graphs, fast search, instance switching, and monitoring & developer tools - all in a super clean & responsive UI.
There is so much valuable information inside ServiceNow, but it spans across unknown areas and tables. I’ve found a way to put everything an admin would want to see, in a single place (a chrome extension). This was a fun project to build out. Initially I built it for myself, but wanted to share it with others after I realized how helpful it was.
It’s a Chrome extension called Sourdough: a read-only, in-browser admin toolkit that gives you:
System health & performance metrics
Fast, unified search across core tables
Instance switching
- Task Management
- CMDB Monitoring
Health monitoring + developer insights
Visuals that actually help you reason about what’s happening & dark mode
All in one place. No update sets. No plugins. No app installs.
If you want to try it here: Install Sourdough - Chrome Extension
The core features of Sourdough are and always will be free. I've added a paid tier ($5/month after a 14 day trial) for users who need the advanced functionality. I’m still figuring out if the pricing makes sense, and am looking for feedback on what feels right.
This is where I need the community:
What’s missing?
What’s confusing?
What feels unnecessary?
What would make this actually useful in your real day job?
Honest feedback is welcome.
Here are a few visuals of the Sourdough plugin in a PDI instance, so you can get a feel of the plugin. There are about 20 visuals and charts in the plugin itself:
Instance Health Snapshot:
You'll find a health number here, based on a combination of several different metrics in your ServiceNow instance. If this number goes down, Sourdough will be able to tell you what's wrong and why.
Instance Overview:
You'll see core metrics for your ServiceNow instance here, like active users, software version, hardware specs, etc. If there's a degraded system status, or your system health is suffering - you will easily be able to see that here.
Recent Tasks:
You can easily view all of the tasks in the system, see what tables they're on and click through to each of them.
API/Integration Response Times:
Here you can view Integration and API related stats for your instance. If you have a slow or bad integration, that data will show up under the API tab. You can click through directly to the records in your instance.
Instance Switching:
Most admins are constantly jumping back and forth between instances, and specific dashboards. You can easily manage countless favorites or links here on the Switch tab.
The plugin has a ton more valuable visuals, these are just a few I wanted to showcase in this post.
If you have questions, concerns, or ideas, drop them here or message me directly.
Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for helping me make this better.
Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, too.
- Jamison Cote
