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

[Michael McNulty]

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?

[Michael McNulty]

Ahh makes sense, and that being the case, perhaps you can use flow the way I mentioned, I'm just not sure what table I would link it to, maybe still the task table since it would have everything I need for the task? I'll have to do some testing, thank you for the input though I appreciate it!

[OlaN]

Hi,

We have some similar requirements at our company, and so far we have created Incidents for these type of tasks. The thought behind it, is that if one of these tasks doesn't get done, an incident will happen.

And so far we haven't had the need to trigger these from Flows, although it's perfectly doable, we've simply triggered these by creating a template (sys_template) of a Incident, and then created a Scheduled Entity Generation (sysauto_template) which basically does the same thing as a scheduled Flow.

The upside to this, is that ITIL users can manage and change their own templates, the only thing an admin needs to do, is to configure changes (if needed) in the schedule of the record generation.

[Michael McNulty]

Wow good thinking! We treat incidents more like "something is currently broken" and tasks as "this needs to be done" at our company, however the idea of letting the ITIL users manage their own templates is really interesting and definitely something I'll have to keep in mind, thank you for this!