Service Operations Workspace Performance

[Joshua Malicoat]

Has anyone experienced performance issues after deploying the Service Operations Workspace to their production environment? We recently rolled out SOW to our new instance with a user base of over 1000, but have been receiving reports of slow load times and significant speed issues. The issues affect various aspects of the workspace, including list views, widgets, tabs, and drop-downs.

Although ServiceNow has posted a fix for this in Utah, our test environment hasn't shown any noticeable improvements with the upgrade. We've attempted to adjust hardware to alleviate the issue, but with no success. Users have reported that MS Edge handles the load better than Chrome, which has become borderline unusable, with transactions taking between 10-30 seconds.

If these performance issues can't be resolved, we may have to revert to the classic view via Next UI, which would be a significant setback considering the amount of time and effort we have invested in hyping up the change. SOW does offer some unique features that are not available in the classic Next UI.

[Vipul Gupta1]

That is absolutely right, SOW offers great features for L1/L2 and even for event managers.

I have enabled it for many accounts and no one has reported the slowness issue. You may want to check the othe jobs running to see the load. I dont think just SOW will have an impact.

[SusanWinKY]

Joshua, have you seen any improvement with patches/upgrades? Thanks.

[Joshua Malicoat]

Hi Susan,

ServiceNow has come quite a long way in the past 6 months with Workspaces. We are currently on Utah for our instance with the 3.1 Workspace version and the environment has stabilized significantly. We are currently testing the Vancouver 4.1 SOW version and will be deploying it later this month with our overall instance upgrade. 

Here are some recommendations I can give that helped us.

• Ensure you are on at least 3.0 or 4.0 versions of Workspace. There was significant performance fixes with the upgraded versions. 
• Workspace is very hardware resource heavy. Ensuring all user's PC standards are met, including having at least 16 GBs of ram will help alot!
• Confirm any Anti-virus/DLP software is whitelisting ServiceNow addresses and cache files. Our variance in browser performance (Chrome versus Edge) boiled down to DLP (Digital Loss Prevention) scans hitting ServiceNow's temp cache files causing major slowdowns. Workspace has a TON of caching happening in the background to squeeze as much performance as it can out of your computer.
• Avoid making any significant adjustments via the UI Builder to the SOW homepage. We had adjusted the dials to show more information on the homepage that had caused slowdowns on initial load. Reverting back to OOTB helped with load times.

Hope this helps!