Service Now Self-Hosting blueprint – Part 5

[Gaurav Bajaj]

This is part 5 of self hosting blueprint continued from last topic around key roles that you need to have in order to manage and maintain your Service Now self-hosted platform.

4) Database Administrator (DBA)

Depending on whichever database you choose between Maria DB or Oracle, you will require a dedicated database admin to do the following things.

• Monitor database performance (indexes, slow queries, table sizes)
• Perform backups, restores, and failover testing
• Tune database parameters for optimal performance
• Apply security patches to the DB engine
• Manage DB growth and archiving strategies

5)  Monitoring & Performance Engineer

This role is to ensure you have sufficient monitoring in place for ServiceNow application, server, database and the network layer.

• Monitor ServiceNow health dashboards (node availability, thread usage)
• Track application logs, error logs, slow transactions
• Use tools like Splunk, Dynatrace, ELK, or native instance logs for monitoring.

6)   Backup & DR Specialist

A DR site engineer is equally important for smooth operation although their involvement may not be required on day-to-day basis. The following are a few things they need to take care of.

• Implement regular backup schedules for DB & file system
• Tests restore procedures periodically
• Maintain DR runbooks for failover scenarios.

7)  Security Engineer

Security engineer may not be required on full time basis but below are following things that needs to be reviewed or managed by them.

• Regularly run vulnerability scans on the OS, DB, and application
• Apply security patches promptly
• Manage SSL/TLS certificates and encryption
• Enforce access controls & audit logging
• Conduct penetration testing and remediation
• Ensure compliance with industry standards (ISO, NCA, GDPR, etc.)

At the end, this is not an exhaustive list, you may need other roles to come in on need basis for expert advise.

As a platform owner, you will have to always find balance between different teams and work in collaboration!