What is Instance Observer, and How Do You Get Started with it?

[Harsha Neerchal]

When something goes wrong with software that you bought, it's never a fun day at the office. Fortunately, for most ServiceNow customers, those days don't come by too often. For the days when they do happen though, we built Instance Observer to help you get things sorted.

Instance Observer (or IO for short 🙂) is an observability platform that helps you identify and troubleshoot incidents and performance issues on your instances. It's included as part of all paid Impact Success Plans.

Here's a simple breakdown of what Instance Observer does:

📊 Summarizes your key instance performance metrics in a single dashboard
🛠 Tells you what you should fix on your instance right away
📱 Alerts you via your preferred channels when something gets out of whack
🔎 Helps you figure out the root cause of an incident
📈 Tracks over 15 performance metrics for you in real-time
📑 Creates customizable instance performance reports for you and your team

To get started, check out this 6 minute video that tells you exactly what you need to do to set up Instance Observer so that you're able to proactively get in front of issues that pop up on your ServiceNow instances:

Once you've watched this video and you're all set up - check out THIS post on how you can use Instance Observer to triage and diagnose an incident when it happens.

If you've got more questions about Instance Observer, check out some of the links below:

For more information about the customizing dashboards:

Full list of configurable dashboard widgets

For more information about alerts and notifications:

Alerts available for Guided customers

Alerts available for Total customers (or Guided customers with an Instance Observer Features Add-On)

For more information about reporting:

Instance Observer report telemetry details