Report on outbound email - too many notifications?

atlawson
Tera Contributor

Hi - our customers are complaining that they receive too many e ails from ServiceNow. We susp3ct this is due to the number automatic notifications for different processes that have built up over time.

 

I have been asked to to provide reporting to show the average number of notifications being sent per case, but am struggling to work out how to report on email log tables.

 

does anyone have any suggestions for how I could achieve this? Or any suggestions for how to try and size the issue of excessive customer notifications?

 

thanks

 

3 REPLIES 3

Diogo Ramos
Giga Sage

Have you tried looking at sys_email_log ? You can see the email linked to the notification and do some reporting from there, for example : 

DiogoRamos_0-1729344248813.png

You can add dot walked fields from the email / event or notification table.

From there it's a matter of analyzing, which notifications are being sent more times (for example grouping on notification). And understanding further how they are triggered and how to reduce them, for example you can look at email digests:

Also consider understanding the concept of weight on a notification :

Notifications that have the same target table and recipients are considered duplicates if the weights are different. If weights are same, an additional evaluation is done to check if the subject and the body (excluding watermark) are same to qualify as duplicate notification. When there are duplicate notifications, the system only sends the notification with the highest weight. All other notifications are moved from the Outbox to the Skipped mailbox. The default value 0 causes the system to send the notification (assuming the conditions are met).

For example, suppose that a service desk agent adds a comment to an incident and shortly thereafter closes it. By default, these actions trigger both the Incident commented and Incident Closed notifications.

However, both notifications are from the Incident table and also notify the incident caller. The system only sends the notification with the highest weight, which in this case is the Incident Closed notification."

Docs here

Hope it helps 



 

 

 



atlawson
Tera Contributor

Thank you for the steer on email digests and weighting. I had not heard of these, and both could be effective strategies for reducing the current levels of notifications.

 

I have had a look at the log files table.  I don't have access to the records in that table, but I can take it to our admins.  I don't think we would be able to use it to create any ServiceNow reports though, only apply filters to a list and potential export out of ServiceNow to report on else where.

atlawson
Tera Contributor

Hi @Thomas_Davis

Sorry for the direct mention - please can you help with this question?

 

I'm working the basis that if you don't know how to do this, it probably can't be done. 🙂

 

Thanks, Andy