Your ServiceNow platform is critical for your business. It automates some of your most important business processes, helping you to increase efficiency, reduce costs, and empower employees with great experiences. That’s why it’s so important to ensure that your ServiceNow instances are healthy and running at peak performance. By maintaining good platform health, you reduce the cost of ownership, improve user experiences, and avoid issues such as difficulty upgrading.
ServiceNow gives you a range of tools to help you keep your platform healthy. One of the most important of these is a Health Assessment. This is an Impact Accelerator where ServiceNow experts carry out a technical analysis of a ServiceNow instance to identify any key health issues. It gives you prescriptive guidance on how to improve the health of the instance, along with insights into leading practices for maintaining instance health.
What will a Health Assessment tell me?
Many things can affect the health of your ServiceNow instance. It’s important to assess the most critical areas, which is exactly what a Health Assessment does. It looks at five major health areas, including:
- Manageability: This focuses on how you manage ServiceNow configuration and data. It helps you to reduce the amount of time you spend on administrative activities. For instance, it looks at things like whether your CMDB is populated appropriately, how much code you’ve written, and how many update sets you’ve created.
- Performance: This is about making sure that your instance is fast and responsive. This provides a better experience for your users and helps them to be more efficient. For example, are you using inefficient scripting techniques, are your report queries optimized for performance, and are forms taking too long to load?
- Security: Keeping your ServiceNow instance secure is a crucial part of keeping it healthy. Security is always important, but it’s particularly important when you’re handling things like personal data. With a Health Assessment, you’ll be able to answer critical security questions, such as whether the right security plug-ins are enabled, whether you have set appropriate security properties, and whether you have put the right access control rules in place.
- Upgradeability: To get access to the latest ServiceNow innovations and enhancements, it’s important that you upgrade regularly. However, a number of issues can affect your ability to successfully upgrade. A Health Assessment identifies these issues, including things like whether you’ve modified any baseline platform capabilities, whether you’re using any deprecated APIs, and how much work you need to do before you can upgrade.
- User experience: ServiceNow delivers great user experiences out-of-the-box, but customizations and poor configuration choices can negatively affect this experience, making the system frustrating to use. A Health Assessment highlights common user experience issues—things like forms that are too big, navigation bars that don’t contain useful information, and poorly designed or inefficient processes.
By focusing on these five areas, a Health Assessment gives you the insights you need to minimize performance issues, avoid over-customization and poor coding practices, deliver consistent user experiences, simplify upgrades, and identify technical governance gaps. As a result, you:
- Reduce technical debt and lower platform cost of ownership.
- Accelerate time to value because you shorten development cycles and can upgrade faster.
- Increase user adoption due to better performance and user experiences.
- Avoid platform security risks by following security best practices.
When should you request a Health Assessment?
You can request a Health Assessment multiple times—you’re not limited to a single assessment. Good times to request a Health Assessment include:
- On a regular basis—for example, monthly or quarterly,
- When you see an unexpected decline in how your instance is performing,
- When you’re preparing for an upgrade,
- After you’ve upgraded.
- When you’re preparing for code release.
How does a Health Assessment work?
As we said, a Health Assessment is an Impact accelerator—a fixed-scope services engagement with ServiceNow experts who work with you to achieve a defined set of outcomes. All Impact customers can request the Health Assessment accelerator (you can find information on requesting accelerators here), but the scope of the assessment depends on whether you have a Guided or Total Impact package:
- Guided: ServiceNow will scan one of your sub-production instances for health issues using our automated HealthScan tool. We will provide a list of specific findings, along with an overview of the instance’s health, broken down into the categories we’ve discussed previously. We’ll review these findings with you in an interactive 90-minute session, including providing recommendations. You also have the opportunity to request an optional 60-minute follow-up Q&A session.
- Total: This includes everything that Guided Impact customers receive, but it provides a more tailored engagement designed to focus on your specific priorities and needs. After a 60-minute initial alignment session, we’ll conduct an additional 60-minute discovery session to understand your particular pain points and the areas you want the Health Assessment to focus on. Then, we will scan one of your sub-production instances using HealthScan, and share the findings with you and provide recommendations in an interactive 90-minute session. You can also request an optional 60-minute follow-up Q&A session.
What’s not included in a Health Assessment?
As we said, a Health Assessment is an Impact accelerator, so it has a fixed scope. Therefore, anything that’s not specifically identified as being in scope isn’t included. This means that activities such as design reviews and code reviews are out of scope.
