Does adding forms for incident creation impact SNOW’s performance?

[brunomacedo]

At our company, we have a very large operation, and often users open tickets as if they’re facing serious issues — when in reality, they’re simply not following the proper procedures.

We have a team responsible for providing training to users, and we also have several knowledge bases within ServiceNow itself. However, users often prefer to open a ticket instead of reading the KBs.

So, we came up with the idea of adding some mandatory questions to the ticket creation process, to ensure that the user has followed all the necessary steps before being allowed to submit a ticket. However, the team is raising concerns that this might have a negative impact on ServiceNow’s performance.

I’d like to know if this is true, and if there is a way to create new fields for a catalog item without negatively impacting ServiceNow’s overall performance.

[Simon Hendery]

Short answer is no. ServiceNow is a robust enterprise solution. It's not going to fall over if you add a couple fields.

[GlideFather]

Olá @brunomacedo,

on the contrary adding fields is crucial to use ServiceNow according to your needs.

What can cause some performance issues are for example scripts - imagine you have a form with 15 fields and all of them are automated/prepoulated but each with different script instead of one or two... or any other behaviour that is "behind the scenes".

So to answer your question - adding fields has no performance impact, but the impact is on how your instance is maintained and governed.

But most of the thing is just a common sense - for example database manipulation wouldn't be executed in the middle of the day but rather early morning or late nights etc... 

Let me know if you have any particular question to discuss

[GlideFather]

@brunomacedo and just one more note - please if possible try to avoid referring to ServiceNow as "SNOW" it is not correct and it makes you look like you don't know ServiceNow well.

Snow is a different IT product, stick with ServiceNow or Now, never ever SNOW 😛

[Community Alums]

Adding a few mandatory fields or questions to your incident or request form (or catalog item) generally does not have a noticeable impact on ServiceNow performance, especially if you’re just adding standard fields like choice lists, checkboxes, or text fields. ServiceNow is built to handle large numbers of fields and data, and modern instances easily support this kind of customization.

Where you might see performance issues is if you add complex client scripts, synchronous GlideAjax calls, or heavy business rules that run every time the form loads or is submitted. But just adding new fields themselves — even required ones — won’t slow down the platform.

So yes, you can definitely add your mandatory questions to guide users, and as long as you design them simply (for example: choice fields, yes/no checkboxes, and short descriptions) and avoid adding too many complex scripts, you shouldn’t see a negative impact on ServiceNow’s performance at all.