Performance limits

[Lionel Bories]

Hello,

My company is using ServiceNow for ITSM purposes (and even non ITSM with Cases for example). Our instance is suffering performance issues since one year, I would say 5 cumulated days where the platform is barely usable, and we even had recently one hour of full non availability.

Some figures:
- using SN since 4 years
- ~1 million incidents created per year, now approx 4 millions total
- ~10 millions tasks created per year, now approx 40 millions total
- ~100k active users per month

Our company internal ServiceNow sys admin is telling:
- performance is slow because there are two much data, as a consequence data must be deleted/archived, to keep only the last 18 months. And "this is the recommendation from ServiceNow teams".

I am "surprised" by those statements.

I am a basic end-user. I am not an admin guy, I am not part of the teams dealing with SN topics in my company.
I am only someone who uses reports and do trend analysis on several years. Loosing that functionality, I loose all the added value of my work of trend and data analysis on several years.

I have question for you:
1. My company is paying a service to ServiceNow. Does that service/contract is stating restrictions like "you can only have 4 million incidents total"?
2. I doubt that my company is the biggest ServiceNow instance. Does that means any instance that has above 40 millions tasks (or 4 millions incidents) reach a glass ceiling, and poor performance is to be expected? And do you receive recommendation from ServiceNow teams to limit the number of tasks?
3. When data are deleted/archived, what do you use as reporting solution on deleted/archived data?

Thank you in advance for any comment, any advice, or any other point of view.

Best regards,

Lionel

[Marcos Kassak]

Hi @Lionel Bories,

Probably data is not the main reason here, you potentially could have many other issues to address such as customizations, slow-running scripts, etc.

Archiving is always in the recommendations especially if your company has policies for data retention, also, you won't lose that data as it would be transferred to another table from ServiceNow and can be checked anytime.

You may want to tell your Admin to raise a case to ServiceNow (if they are not doing that) to index fields in those important tables so the queries can run faster.

There is also a module for Slow Running Scripts, where your admin can start from there to gather all the poor code and business rules that may be affecting users - not to mention if your Service Portal is using customized widgets.

FYI - ServiceNow does regular scans on your instance and if there is something that needs to be done, they automatically raise a case to be resolved and your admin is contacted, so they won't leave you hanging with slow performance or suffering with poor services.

Make sure to check this article and forward it to your admin's team: https://www.servicenow.com/community/now-platform-articles/recommendations-for-optimal-instance-perf...

https://www.servicenow.com/community/itsm-blog/5-ways-to-troubleshoot-your-instance-performance/ba-p...

[ersureshbe]

Hi,

I hope data archive policies are enabled for the tables. If not pls enable it

Next, Ask to get a health scan report and get the health score. You follow the explanation as per the health check report and do the config & resolve issues. It will help to improve the instance performance.