Generic troubleshooting steps to resolve issues encountered in the Suggested steps generation skill feature
Product documentation reference: Cluster incidents for the Suggested steps generation skill.
As an admin, if the Suggested steps generation skills feature is not working as expected, do the following:
- Check that you have installed the latest Now Assist for ITSM plugin available for your instance from store.servicenow.com.
- Check if other Now assist for ITSM skills are working. If other skills are not working as expected, then there could be a major configuration issue on your instance.
Setup in Now Assist Admin (NAA)
Symptom 1: In the Record clustering screen, when you select Launch clustering, it gives an error message:
Reason #1: Check that the filter condition is valid and the applied query yields more than 2,000 records:
- Look at the condition on these two var sets, they should match:
- Suggested steps generation Choose inputs > conditions
- GAF Suggested Steps ITSM grouping > Grouping inputs > Filter
- Apply the same query on the Incident table list, the query should return at least 2,000 records, so GAF can create Clusters. Otherwise, the GAF Offline job will fail on the training phase. You will see an error in the ml_solution record that gets created every time that the Offline job is triggered.
- Avoid triggering the Launch clusters action in the NAA screen if the instance does not have the filter query fixed.
Reason #2: Filter condition is valid and returns more than 2,000 records but the NAA Cluster still shows error state:
- Check the sn_gaf_sysauto_script table to ensure that there’s a valid GAF Job tracker record.
Most recent job tracker record must have the following values:
- Offline job = GAF – Run Offline Flow
- Group skill = GAF
- Suggested Steps ITSM grouping should be active
- State = “Offline job complete”
- Check the records on ml_solution table:
You should see a record with a training solution name like: “ml_x_snc_sn_itsm_aia_global_incident_clustering_<timestamp>”, and state is on “Solution Complete” and progress=100%, also it may take some time for the ML Solution to complete, especially if the filter condition used on Grouping skill covers a large data set (100k+). Verify that the state is not in any of the following error states:
- Unauthorized – if you encounter this error, open a case with Now Support, as the instance is not able to send training requests to the ML-trainer server.
- Error while training the solution – Open a case with Now Support if this issue occurs and you have already verified that the filter on the GAF Suggested Steps Grouping Skill is valid and is returning more than 2,000 records.
- Training request time out – Due to capacity you may see these errors, in that case is ok to try again one more time, before opening a case with Now Support.
- After the ML Solution “ml_x_snc_sn_itsm_aia_global_incident_clustering_...” is completed, a second ML Solution will be created with the Solution name = “ml_x_snc_global_global_sn_gaf_record_group_detail_group_action_<timestamp>”, please ensure that this solution automatically goes to “Solution Complete” state.
- In case of any unexpected issues during the ML Solution training, GAF would retry that two ML solutions described above 3 times. It’s ok to see multiple entries here for the same solution name.
- To validate that the Offline job has been completed successfully, ensure these records are pointing to valid records for the GAF Suggested Steps ITSM skills:
- From Navigator: Group-Action Framework > Record group > Active list should return valid records
- From Navigator: Group-Action Framework > Record group detail > Active list should return valid records
- From Navigator: Group-Action Framework > Action strategy results > Active list should return valid records
Symptom #2: Suggested Steps generation skill works in Global domain but not in custom domain.
Today this skill is only supported in Global domain, any other domain would require manual creation of configurations and overall is not supported for v1.
Suggested Steps card is not rendering in SOW form
Symptom #1: Skill is active but Suggested steps is not rendering for Agents.
- Ensure Agents using the skill have the configured in-product role in NAA.
- Ensure that the OOTB Recommended action configuration is not customized and have a different role (OOTB role value = itil):
- From Navigator: Recommended Actions > Context > Incident context > Rules related list > GAF Suggested Steps (roles = admin,itil, active = true)
- From Navigator: Recommended Actions > Context > Incident context > Recommendations related list > GAF Suggested steps (Active=true, Resource generator = “GAF Suggested steps Resource generator”.
- Resource generator should be active and not customized.
- Script include sn_gaf.SuggestedStepsScriptingGenerator should be active and not customized.
Symptom #2: Skill is active but suggested steps are not showing for certain records.
- Ensure that the OOTB Recommended action configuration is not customized and have a different condition set in the rule record:
From Navigator: Recommended Actions > Context > Incident context > Rules related list > GAF Suggested Steps (OOTB condition Active=true and short_description IS NOT Empty).
- There’s a chance that certain records have already a sn_nb_action_context record created before the Suggested steps was properly activated, this is an expected behavior with Recommended Action framework, the workaround here is to delete the sn_nb_action_context record and have agent to refresh the SOW Record page.
Symptom #3: Suggested card renders but result is “No resolution steps found for this issue”:
- Check in the logs if there’s an Error log with message ‘GAFDataUtils: Error while executing the parallel request in sync flow:The current operation ended in state: ERROR. Detail: max iteration limit exceeded’. If you get this error: “GAF couldn’t generate suggested steps due to the amount of records processed exceeded the limit on the system,” open a Now Support case.
- Check for this message in the logs “getPredictionResult: No GAF output could be generated since none of the records had a similarity score above the set threshold limit.” or “GAFPrediction: No records were eligible hence no gaf output could be generated.” This means that GAF validations couldn’t find a similar record to generate suggested steps from. This is not an issue, and probably if the agent provides more information on the context of the incident, it will generate results next time that Suggested steps are generated.
- Check if there are any errors in the sys_generative_ai_log table for the following definitions, if other skills are performing well, for NowLLM then open a Now Support case. If other skills are also having issues, then most likely there’s a major issue with the instance, in that case check that all other plugins are up to date. Check for outages on mlpredictor servers:
- GAF KB-able definition
- GAF Mapper definition
- GAF Reducer definition
