Health Log Analytics offers unparalleled insight into the operational health of your ServiceNow components, and your MID Servers are prime candidates for this enhanced monitoring. However, bridging the gap between HLA's potential and a fully monitored MID Server fleet often involves a significant setup hurdle, especially in large environments. What if you could bypass the repetitive configuration loops and establish consistent, scalable monitoring? This guide details a streamlined approach to deploying HLA for your MID Servers, transforming a potentially lengthy process into a manageable and repeatable strategy. Get ready to enhance your MID server observability without the setup bottleneck.
Why Monitor MID Servers with HLA?
Your MID Servers are the crucial link between your ServiceNow instance and your infrastructure. They handle everything from discovery probes and integration traffic to orchestration activities and Agent Client Collector communications. When a MID Server experiences issues – whether it's performance degradation, errors, or connectivity problems – the impact can be immediate and severe:
- Discovery Failures: Incomplete CMDB data.
- Integration Outages: Broken workflows and data synchronization issues.
- Automation Stops: Orchestration tasks halt mid-execution.
- Monitoring Gaps: ACC agents might lose connection or fail to report data.
While basic OS-level monitoring and MID Server dashboard checks are useful, they often don't capture the nuanced application-level issues hidden within the MID Server logs (agent.log, wrapper.log, etc.). This is where Health Log Analytics shines. HLA can:
- Detect subtle anomalies in log patterns that indicate emerging problems.
- Identify specific error messages across multiple MIDs quickly.
- Reduce Mean Time To Detect (MTTD) by surfacing issues proactively.
- Correlate events that might otherwise seem unrelated.
Investing in proper HLA monitoring for your MIDs isn't just about adding another tool; it's about ensuring the resilience and reliability of core ServiceNow functionalities. Paired with your System Logs, you can combine an end-to-end view of these errors.
To see more details on setting up HLA for your Platform System Logs: Start Monitoring your ServiceNow instance with Predictive AIOps
The Scalability Challenge
Setting up HLA for a single MID Server is manageable. You configure the Data Input for each MID Server, setup Data Mapping and Source type Structures. The process quickly becomes:
- Highly Repetitive: Performing the same UI clicks, data entry, and configuration steps over and over.
- Time-Consuming: What takes minutes for one MID can consume hours or days for the entire fleet.
- Prone to Errors: Manual repetition increases the likelihood of typos, misconfigurations, or missed steps, leading to inconsistent monitoring.
- Difficult to Maintain: Updating configurations across all MIDs manually is another significant time sink.
This "click-ops" approach simply doesn't scale effectively in enterprise environments with more than 5 mid servers. It discourages comprehensive monitoring adoption and burns out valuable technical resources on low-value, repetitive tasks. We need a better way.
Deploying at Scale
The good news is that you can escape the manual setup grind. By leveraging the provided update set and following steps, we can create a repeatable and scalable process for onboarding your MID Servers into Health Log Analytics.
The steps outlined below provide a structured methodology to:
- Standardize the HLA configuration for your MID Servers.
- Minimize manual intervention required for each MID.
- Accelerate the deployment process significantly.
- Ensure consistency across your monitored environment.
How we can make this happen:
- Import the Attached Update Set. Which contains:
* Script Includes
* Scheduled (on Demand) Script Execution
* Source Type Structure
* Script Templates (2)
* Event Rule
- Locate the Scheduled Job / Scheduled Script Execution by name: Create MID Data Inputs and Mappings
- Configure the encoded query to target the Mid Servers you want to setup for HLA Log Streaming.
- Run the Scheduled Job.
RESULTS: All HLA Records are created for your Mid Servers
* Data Inputs
* Data Input Mapping
* Source Type Structure (only one needed for all MIDs)
- Review/Confirm setup is accurate.
* Navigate to Health Log Analytics > Data Input > Data Inputs. Here you should see all record for each mid server from your query in an Inactive state.
* Navigate Health Log Analytics > Mapping > Data Input Mapping Remove the Active Filter, you should see a record for each Mid Server. Each record should have the same mapping script:
function map(sample, metadata) {
var midName = metadata.eventStream.midName;
return {
'applicationService': "Mid Servers",
'component': midName,
'sourceType': "Basic_MidServer",
};
}
// Do not write code here
- Publish all records Data Inputs and Data Input Mapping Records.
- Navigate to Health Log Analytics > Source Type Structures
* Locate the record Named Basic_MidServer
* Confirm the script section contains the right template:
function construct(sample, output) {
var severityRegex = /\b(ERROR|INFO|WARNING|DEBUG)\b/i;
severityMatch = sample.match(severityRegex);
if (severityMatch) {
output.severity = severityMatch[0].toUpperCase();
} else {
output.severity = "INFO";
}
}
- Validate/Configure the Key/Value Mapping
- HLA is now running for all your MIDs.
Conclusion:
By following these steps, you've replaced a potentially tedious, error-prone manual process with a streamlined, scalable approach to MID Server monitoring using Health Log Analytics. This not only saves significant administrative effort but also ensures consistent, proactive visibility into the health of these critical components. You're now better equipped to catch issues early, reduce downtime, and maintain a more resilient ServiceNow infrastructure.
