ServiceNow Self-Hosting blueprint – Part 3

[Gaurav Bajaj]

Continuing from our last blog on ServiceNow self hosting blueprint design considerations, below are remaining critical factors.

4.   Disaster Recovery

Regardless of the amount of redundancy you implement, it is essential to have a strategy in place for catastrophic failures.

Here are the steps you should take:

• Disaster Recovery Site: Most organizations typically establish a Disaster Recovery (DR) site situated in a different geographical area. Based on the significance of ServiceNow as a business application for your organization, initiate discussions with the server and security teams to plan for the installation of a DR site for ServiceNow. The configuration can mirror that of your primary site.
• Automated Failover: Depending on the critical nature of your business, consider automating the failover process to the DR site. If automation is not feasible, ensure that a clear Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) is established to initiate the manual failover process.
• Regular DR Testing: Conduct tests of your DR procedures at least on a quarterly basis to verify their effectiveness. Many organizations overlook this crucial step—make sure you are not among them. 

5.    Monitoring

Monitoring serves as the primary defense mechanism in any self-hosted environment.

You should ensure coverage of the following aspects:

• Application Monitoring: It is essential to monitor key ServiceNow components such as web services, background jobs, and transaction response times. You can integrate your ServiceNow instance with application monitoring tools like Dynatrace, AppDynamics, and Datadog, among others.
• Server Monitoring: Continuous monitoring of CPU, memory, disk usage, and network health is crucial. SolarWinds is a commonly utilized tool for tracking server-level metrics. It is important to implement it on both database and application servers.
• Network Monitoring: Keep an eye on bandwidth, latency, packet loss, and firewall rules.
• Automated Alerts & Incident Logging: It is advisable to integrate your monitoring tools with ServiceNow to automatically generate incidents for critical alerts.

That’s all for some critical design considerations for self-hosting journey. ServiceNow has great documentation on each of these areas along with installation guides. Once you have access to Now Support from your organization, please refer to a self-hosting knowledge base which cover in-depth details around each of design, deployment and maintenance considerations.