Why does email come 2 - 3 hours after incident was created?

[Myron Smith]

We have set up email alarms to be created whenever an incident is created. Sometimes our emails are coming 2 - 3 hours after the incidents are created and we can't figure out why.

[Aman Kumar S]

Hey,

There could be several reasons for this, feel free to explore causes and troubleshooting steps:

Incident creation delayed or incident not created from alert

Feel free to mark correct, If I answered your query.

Will be helpful for future visitors looking for similar questions 🙂

[Allen Andreas]

Hi,

You'd want to check your sys_email table for the actual sent time on the specific email. If you're using a "From" alias on a notification, your email server (recipient server) could be the actual point of delay and not ServiceNow.

You'd want to review from multiple angles on this issue.

Please mark reply as Helpful/Correct, if applicable. Thanks!

[Anish Reghu]

Hi Myron,

Reading your question, I get a sense that the phrase "alarm" might cause confusion amongst colleagues answering your query. I am sure, you are not referring to ServiceNow alarm rather you are saying email itself as an alarm in context. Isn't it?

Cheers,

Anish

[Richard Hine]

Myron,

I had this with one of my customers, it is well worth looking at how many notifications are being sent in a day. The number of notifications in send-ready state (They had too many notifications to too many people!)  were the cause of the delay.

I recall we compared the created and updated fields on messages that were in state 'sent' to quickly identify that in our case the delay was inside SN.

Hope this helps,

Richard