For the vast majority of ServiceNow customers, the ServiceNow platform is absolutely crucial for their business. They use it to automate their most important business processes, leveraging the power of the platform to deliver great user experiences, increase efficiency, lower costs, and drive constant innovation. That’s why ServiceNow is the platform for digital business.
Because your business depends on ServiceNow, it’s critically important to keep your ServiceNow instances in great shape. To do this, you need to know about any health and performance issues in your production, development, and test instances. Armed with this visibility, you can:
- Improve the user experience by proactively identifying and fixing health and performance issues in your production instances.
- Stop issues from making it into production by seeing the health and performance impact of planned updates on your development and test instances.
- Innovate faster because you can confidently introduce new capabilities into production, knowing they are unlikely to cause health and performance issues.
- Reduce operational costs and technical debt by addressing performance and health issues early on rather than waiting to deal with the fallout.
That’s why we’ve created Instance Observer.
What is Instance Observer?
Instance Observer is a purpose-built observability and monitoring tool that’s included with ServiceNow Impact, our first-of-a-kind value acceleration solution. It gives you a single pane of glass to manage the health and performance of all of your ServiceNow instances, providing real-time instance telemetry as well as historical insights that let you proactively identify trends and anomalies. Instance Observer:
- Is built by the same team that manages the ServiceNow cloud and uses the same data model that our support team uses. This makes it easy to share Instance Observer data with support so you can work together to quickly troubleshoot and remediate issues.
- Runs in its own environment that’s maintained by ServiceNow. Because it doesn’t run directly on your instances, you can always access it even if one of your instances isn’t available.
- Is upgraded by ServiceNow so you always have access to the latest and greatest capabilities. Customers don’t need to do anything for the upgrade—it’s handled automatically.
Now, let’s take a detailed look at what Instance Observer gives you.
See current health and performance issues at a glance
Let’s start with an example. Suppose you get an alert that something is wrong with one of your instances (we’ll talk about alerts in a minute). You open up Instance Observer and click on the Triage tab, which gives you a snapshot of the current status of your instances. You select the instance that has the issue. You instantly see that the instance is available and that most of the key KPIs—which are generated from instance telemetry—are normal. However, you notice that the Jobs KPI is highlighted in yellow, indicating that you have a large number of long-running jobs. You drill into the details with one click and instantly see which jobs are causing the problem. You save the contents of the Triage screen and share it with ServiceNow support and the rest of your team so they can work on the issue.
Congratulations. In less than a minute, you’ve identified the issue and are on your way to fixing it.
Get historical insights and identify performance anomalies
Let’s look at another example. You’re developing an enhancement for one of your ServiceNow applications. Currently, you have the enhancement running in your test instance, but you haven’t put it into production yet. Before you do, you want to confirm that the enhancement isn’t causing any performance issues. You open up Instance Observer and look through the performance charts for your test instance. Since the enhancement does a lot of database updates, you’re particularly concerned about database growth. Fortunately, the database growth chart shows that there hasn’t been any significant growth, so you’re now confident you can release this enhancement to production.
Of course, performance charts aren’t limited to your test environment. There are more than 90 metrics available and we add to this almost every release, giving you historical insights into every aspect of the performance and health of all of your instances, including your production instances. For instance, you can easily see if there are periodic spikes in transaction times, indicating that an intermittent performance degradation is affecting the user experience. Instance Observer can even identify anomalies that aren’t easy for you to see, using AI to detect abnormal behavior. You can also generate performance reports and share them with your business stakeholders to keep them up-to-date on how ServiceNow is performing and the progress you’re making on resolving any issues.
Receive proactive alerts when there’s a health or performance issue
When there’s a significant instance health or performance issue, you need to take action right away before your uses are affected. But to act, you need to know there’s a problem.
With Instance Observer, you can set up alerts on the KPIs you care about and get notified via email, SMS, ServiceNow workflows, or third-party tools such as Teams or Slack when there’s an issue. By default, each alert uses the same threshold value that our support teams use, but because you know your own ServiceNow environment best, you can also set your own thresholds. You can also create alerts for anomalies that Instance Observer detects through AI.
Get additional insights with built-in analytics
Finally, Instance Observer comes with analytics that give you additional insights into the health and performance of your ServiceNow instances. Using these analytics, you can create charts that overlay performance from two separate time periods—for example, before and after a release —so you can easily see if the changes you’ve made have had any performance impact. You can also visualize high-level trends in top transaction and query patterns, overlay other metrics, and drill into the details.
