Preventive Care - What Do you Get, and How Can it Help You?

[Harsha Neerchal]

Preventive Care: what you get, and how it helps

Keep your platform healthy and break the escalation loop

Sometimes all is not well with your platform. Things aren’t working, and you find yourself stuck in escalation after escalation. We know that’s not a fun place to be. To help you get out of those loops and set your platform up to stay healthy, we created Preventive Care, available as an Add-On to your Impact Success Plan. Here’s what you get, how it helps, and how it’s different from the other platform health features in Impact.

The benefits

❤️	A healthier instance.
✌️	Fewer P1 and P2 tickets.
👩‍🔧	Hands-on help from ServiceNow’s most experienced support engineers.

What you actually get

Twice a year, you get an engagement with a Preventive Care engineer, who will:

1	Meet with your team and your Impact Squad to understand your instance health issues and concern areas.
2	Comprehensively review your instance health and performance metrics.
3	Present their findings and recommendations back to you.
4	Work hands-on with you and your team for four weeks to implement the recommendations, and make sure they actually work.

For even more detail, see the Preventive Care documentation.

Common questions

What happens in the engagement

What metrics will my engineer look at?

They get deep in the weeds, from event backlogs to database growth. Every metric tracked in Instance Observer gets a long, hard evaluation. For the full list, see the tracked Performance KPIs.

How will I know the recommendations actually worked?

At the end of every engagement, your engineer walks you through each recommendation that was implemented and shows you whether the fix delivered the expected benefit to your platform.

What are some real examples of benefits?

Think of your instance like a car engine: Preventive Care helps it run faster and reduces the chance of a breakdown. Inside your instance, that looks like faster transaction response times, faster database response times, or fewer errors (like HTTP 429s).

How it’s different from other stuff you get

How is a Preventive Care engineer different from other Support folks?

Preventive Care engineers are our most senior support engineers, with many years of experience on the ServiceNow platform. They’re experts in their field.

How is it different from the Health Assessments or Platform Health in the Impact App?

The Health Assessment accelerator includes a diagnostic scan of your instances plus a readout of the results. Some findings touch performance, but they are generally focused on best-practice violations and technical debt, so think longer-term reliability. The same goes for the Platform Health features in the Impact App. Preventive Care is laser-focused on performance, keeping your instance free of downtime and outages.

How does it relate to Instance Observer?

Your engineer does a deep dive into all the performance metrics Instance Observer tracks, using them as a key source of data for their recommendations.

Coverage and access

How do I buy it?

If you’re on a paid Impact Success Plan, you can purchase the Preventive Care Add-On. Talk to your account team for the latest pricing details.

Does it cover multiple production instances?

Each engagement covers one production instance. But since you get two engagements a year, you can have two different instances worked on in a given year.

Can my Preventive Care engineer respond to ad-hoc support cases?

No. Ad-hoc support cases go through the normal Now Support channels.

Got other questions about Preventive Care? Drop them in the comments below.

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