on - edited by
Harsha Neerchal
To maximize the benefits you get from ServiceNow, it's critical to keep your ServiceNow instances running smoothly. By proactively identifying and addressing health and performance issues, you deliver better user experiences and increase adoption. To do this, you need to be able to monitor all of your ServiceNow instances—not just production instances, but development and test instances as well. For example, monitoring test instances lets you identify and fix performance issues before they make it into production.
Instance Observer gives you these health and performance insights. It's a purpose-built monitoring tool that's included with ServiceNow Impact, giving you a single pane of glass to monitor all of your instances in one place. Interested? Here are the top 9 things you need to know about instance Observer.
- It's an off-instance application that runs in a separate environment managed by ServiceNow. This means you can always access it as long as you have an internet connection, even if your instances are unavailable. And because ServiceNow provisions and manages Instance Observer, all you have to do is use it—no setup is required.
- It uses the same data model that our support team uses so you see exactly the same type of instance health and performance data that ServiceNow does. This makes it very easy to work with support to troubleshoot and remediate issues, since you now have a common understanding of what's happening and can share data.
- It doesn't impact instance performance. Because it’s an off-instance application, it doesn't consume any of your instances' resources. All of the processing and analysis of Instance telemetry is done in a separate, dedicated environment.
- It isn't tied to ServiceNow family releases. This means you always have access to the latest and greatest Impact Platform Health tooling and capabilities and don't have to upgrade your instances to get these. It also means that your instances can be at different release levels—for example, you can monitor your Vancouver production instance and your Washington test instance at the same time.
- It gives you near-real-time telemetry, visualizing the current status of an instance in an easy-to-understand triage dashboard that highlights abnormal KPIs. This means you can instantly see what's wrong and then drill into the details to get a deeper understanding of the issue. The dashboard contains a comprehensive set of KPIs and other information, covering areas such as transactions, jobs, services, schedulers, semaphore sets, update sets, and more.
- It also gives you historical insights using performance charts and reports. This lets you see how things are changing over time. For example, you can easily see if there are unexpected periodic spikes in transaction times and view jobs and transactions that were running at the time, or confirm that there is no abnormal database growth after you apply an update set. You can also quickly drill into details directly from the performance chart to do more in-depth investigation, and you can also share performance reports with your business stakeholders to keep them up-to-date and show them the progress you're making on any health or performance issues.
- It can also detect performance anomalies using AI. While some health and performance issues are easy to see—for example, when there's a spike or threshold crossing — others are more subtle. For example, a performance metric may deviate from its historical behavior even though it's within acceptable levels. These types of anomalies can indicate trouble down the road. Instance Observer uses AI to detect anomalies of this kind for specific performance metrics, including transaction counts, server response times, SQL response times, semaphore means, and maximum node memory.
- You can set up alerts so you're automatically notified when there is an instance health or performance issue. This lets you react faster, reducing the impact of the issue. For example, you can set an alert threshold on a specific KPI, and you can also create alerts for anomalies that Instance Observer AI detects. There are multiple notification options, including email, SMS, ServiceNow workflows, and integration with third-party messaging tools such as Teams and Slack.
- Instance Observer has in-depth analytics that provide further insights into instance health and performance. You can graphically compare two different time periods—for example, before and after a release—to see if a change has impacted instance performance. You can also visualize trends in transaction and query patterns, including overlaying other metrics and drilling into underlying data.
