What do you think is the best way to do automated scheduled tasks in ServiceNow?

Michael McNulty
Tera Expert

There are several different parts of our IT division and our company that have requested we create scheduled jobs in our ServiceNow instance. The goal of these jobs is to generate a task that assigns to a specific group (which is then emailed that a task has been assigned to them) and these remind them to do things like to periodically update certain system data, check to make sure certain servers are functioning correctly, etc. 

Currently, (We've been doing it this way since before Flow came out) we:

  1. Create a Service Catalog entry for what they're needing, with no variables assigned. 
  2. Create a scheduled job that runs based on the required requested timing that runs a script to place an order for the empty catalog item. 
  3. We then create a flow that runs based on Service Catalog trigger that then creates the catalog tasks with the required information/process listed in the short description and instructions and then once that is closed the flow updates the requested item to closed 

While I was going through some NowLearning courses, I noticed that you can set flows to run based on a schedule instead of a trigger. Based on this idea, I think instead of doing all the steps I listed above, we could just create a flow that runs based on the required schedule, creates a task instead of a catalog task, and then still includes all the information required to complete the job in the task, all within flow designer. 

That seems to be much more efficient and easier to manage, but I'm curious how other people like to configure these scheduled jobs. Does anyone have any input on this or any recommendations based on how you and your team handle these types of processes?

7 REPLIES 7

Brian Lancaster
Tera Sage

What do you mean by create a task instead of a Catalog Task? Task is just a general team of most things people used to call tickets. For example, incidents, changes, problem, etc. are all types of tasks.

When you create a catalog task you tie the task to the requested item record, but when you create a regular task it's my understanding that it's just tied to a selected table. See the screenshots below for better clarification of what I mean. 
find_real_file.png
Non-Catalog Task:
find_real_file.png
Catalog Task:
find_real_file.png

Your screenshots are broken. Please make sure you use the Insert Image button the the editor. Otherwise they will not show properly.

I see that if you insert a record into the task table via script without a task type is default it to task. I do wonder why if you go to the task table as admin and click the new button task is not available as a task type.

Edit: Create task is available so with flow and workflow you can create other task types other than catalog tasks.