Article: Your ServiceNow instance doesn't break overnight. It drifts.

[Michael Moch]

Hi everyone 👋

Something I keep seeing in ServiceNow projects: nobody ever decides to build a platform that's hard to upgrade. It just happens. Someone needs a quick fix before go-live, someone else copies a script "just for now", and two years later the upgrade suddenly takes weeks.

I call it drift. And the annoying thing about drift is that you don't feel it, until you do.

Picture this: the upgrade is planned for two weeks. Then the first preview run comes back with hundreds of skipped records, and suddenly nobody can say which customizations are still needed and which ones could go. Sound familiar? 😅

So I wanted to share the few things I look at first when I get a feeling that an instance is drifting away from OOTB. Nothing fancy, just honest checks.

The upgrade feeling. Honestly, this is my favourite indicator. If the team gets nervous when the next release comes up, that tells you more than any report. Have a look at the skipped records from your last upgrade. Each one is a spot where the platform wanted to give you something new and your customization said "no thanks".

Scripts on the core tables. Open the business rules on incident or change and just scroll for a minute. If you find a lot of custom ones, ask yourself for each: why does this exist? Surprisingly often, a flow or a simple configuration would do the same job today.

OOTB records that were edited directly. We've all done it. Changing an OOTB script include or UI action directly is quick, but from that moment on it stops getting updates. Copy or extend instead, and your future self will thank you. 🙂

The CMDB people work around. When the honest answer to "which server runs this service?" is "better ask someone in the infrastructure team", the CMDB has lost trust. The CMDB Health Dashboard is a good first look: duplicates, orphaned CIs, stale data.

Stuff nobody uses anymore. Catalog items nobody has requested in a year, old workflows, forgotten reports. They don't hurt at first, but you test and carry them along with every single upgrade.

You don't need a big cleanup project for any of this. My advice: pick just one of these, look at it this week, and make it a little better before your next upgrade. OOTB-first works best as a habit, not as a one-time effort.

Now I'm curious: what's the first thing you look at when an instance feels "heavy"? I'm sure I've missed a few good ones, so tell me in the comments 💬

If this was helpful, a Helpful 👍 would mean a lot. It also helps others find the post.

Cheers,
Michael