Keeping your ServiceNow instances healthy and running at peak performance is incredibly important. You depend on ServiceNow to automate your critical business processes, so making sure the platform is in great
shape is a top priority. But how do you do this?
Here's the good news. ServiceNow Impact includes a high-value observability and monitoring tool called Instance Observer. It gives you a single pane of glass to manage the health and performance of all of your ServiceNow instances. And if you want an Impact Guided customer, you get access to an entry-level version of this tool as part of your subscription (Total customers get the fully-featured version). With Instance Observer, you can:
- Identify health and performance issues in your production environment to improve your users' ServiceNow experience.
- Prevent issues from making it into production by seeing how planned updates affect the health and performance of your development and test instances.
- Deliver value more quickly and confidently because you know updates are unlikely to cause health and performance issues when they are put into production.
- Reduce operational costs and technical debt by addressing health and performance issues before they affect your users.
Instantly see the current availability status of your instances
With Instance Observer, you get a real-time view of the availability of all of your instances. Simply go to the Availability tab, and you'll get an up/down status for each of your instances. This makes it easy to know if you have a critical issue that's preventing your users from accessing the instance. The status is based on real-time monitoring data for the instance, so it's always up-to-date and accurate.
Get deep insights into historical health and performance
Beyond availability, Instance Observer lets you visualize the performance of your instances and see how it's trending over time. Simply go to the Performance tab and select from one of the out-of-the-box KPI charts that cover every aspect of your instance — everything from database growth through to transaction response times, semaphores, event queues, schedulers, and more. And they're available for all of your instances. So, whether you're investigating an issue in your production environment or trying to confirm that an update in your test environment isn't causing performance issues, you have near real-time and historical data at your fingertips that lets you do this. For example, the chart below shows intermittent spikes in transmission times that indicate a potential performance problem. You can also drill into the chart to see jobs and transactions that were running at any point in time.
Quickly generate or schedule performance reports
You can also create performance reports by clicking on the Reports tab and share these with your team and other stakeholders—for instance, to keep business stakeholders up-to-date on how ServiceNow is performing and show them the progress you're making on resolving any issues. Get daily summaries of instance health that show you instance availability and performance anomalies, critical support cases, and slow transactions, queries, and jobs. Use database growth reports to see the total size of your database (including shards), how it has increased or decreased over time, and top 20 tables.
Triage
This makes it easy to analyze and fix current health and performance issues. It shows you the near-real-time status of all of your key KPIs at a glance — whether they're normal or not — and lets you drill into underlying platform metadata to get to the root of the problem. For example, if the triage screen shows you that you currently have an issue with long-running jobs, you can drill directly into the metadata to see which jobs are having a problem.
Other key things to know about Instance Observer
- It uses the same data model that our support team uses. This makes it easy to share instance data with them so you can work together to troubleshoot health and performance issues.
- It doesn't run directly on your instances. Instead, it runs in its own environment, which ServiceNow maintains. This means that it doesn't affect instance performance, and you can always access it even if your instances aren't available.
- It isn't tied to family releases, so it can manage all of your instances, provided they are on supported versions. ServiceNow also handles upgrading Instance Observer, so you always get access to the latest features.
Thinking of upgrading to Impact Total?
When you upgrade, you'll get access to the fully-featured version of Instance Observer. This gives you additional powerful features that let you proactively manage instance performance and health. These include:
- Proactive alerts. Set up alert thresholds on any KPI and get automatically notified when there is an issue via SMS, email, ServiceNow workflows, or third-party messaging tools. This gives you instant visibility when there's an issue. Instance Observer also uses AI to identify hard-to-detect performance anomalies and sends proactive alerts when these happen as well.
- Powerful built-in analytics. Get deep insights into the health and performance of your ServiceNow instances. Using these analytics, you can create overlays that let you compare performance from two different time periods—for example, before and after an upgrade. This makes it easy to see whether your changes have had any health or performance impact. You can also visualize high-level trends in top transaction and query patterns, and overlay other metrics to see if there's a correlation
