Service Now Self-Hosting blueprint – Part 4

[Gaurav Bajaj]

Continuing from the last blog, we covered planning and designing the right architecture based on internal security & compliance. This blog is going to cover key roles required to stand up the right team to manage & monitor the self-hosting instance.

As a platform owner, it’s critical to identify the key resources from various teams from your IT department who can support the platform maintenance and ensure a secure and stable platform with future growth and planned road map for various applications on Service Now platform.

Maintaining a self-hosted Service Now requires a combination of skillets as given below.

• Platform Architect

Plays a strategic and technical leadership role to ensure the self-hosted ServiceNow instance is designed, deployed, and maintained with high availability, scalability, security, and performance in mind.

Platform architect is the real glue across which can balance the application team and infrastructure team. Your platform architect needs to ensure a few things on a regular basis.

• Decide on VM sizing, clustering, and load balancing strategies
• Plan for horizontal scaling (additional nodes) or vertical scaling (bigger servers)
• Assess CPU, memory, and storage requirements based on user load
• Define capacity models for growth in users, data, and integrations
• Establish performance baselines and KPIs (e.g., response times, DB query times)
• Core platform activities strategy– Upgrade, updates and Cloning exercises.

• Infrastructure Engineer

Infra engineers, particularly a Linux admin who can focus on server and OS-level maintenance.

• Provision and maintain the underlying OS (Linux/Windows)
• Monitor CPU, RAM, disk usage, network bandwidth
• Ensure high availability (HA) and disaster recovery (DR) setups
• Apply OS-level patches, security hardening, and firewall rules
• Manage backups and restores of the application and database

• Platform Admin

Platform admin is the inside guy to work in collaboration with infrastructure team members (server, database etc.) to ensure application is performing well. He plays a critical role in maintaining the health, availability, and operability of the ServiceNow application and its supporting infrastructure stack.

Since platform admin is managing both the application and its underlying infrastructure, they must handle application-level administration, infrastructure monitoring, and support coordination.

Here are the key activities for a Platform Administrator

• Review and address long-running transactions or slow scripts
• Review logs (system log, error log, MID Server logs) to catch anomalies.
• Analyze event queue and background jobs regularly
• Monitor ServiceNow performance dashboards on regular basis to identify performance spikes or abnormal behavior.
• Monitor table sizes and data growth
• Configure and manage data archiving policies
• Clean up orphaned attachments, logs, and temp tables to manage disk usage.
• Coordinate Service Now version upgrades with testing and rollback plans.
• Maintain environmental consistency between DEV, TEST, and PROD.
• Monitor MID Server status and logs and maintain mid servers.
• Coordinate with Infra/DBA teams to ensure regular backups

Continued in the next blog.