Synthetic monitoring release notes
Summarize
Summary of Synthetic monitoring release notes
The ServiceNow® Synthetic Monitoring application, introduced in the Yokohama release, enables organizations to proactively monitor and optimize the performance and availability of critical HTTP service endpoints. By simulating user transactions, it helps identify performance issues and downtime before they affect real users, enhancing overall user experience. This application integrates within the Service Operations Workspace (SOW) and is available through the ServiceNow Store.
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Key Features
- Create and manage synthetic monitors: Configure tests that simulate end-user transactions on critical service endpoints to detect failures early.
- Alert configuration: Set alerts to notify your team when tests fail, allowing prompt issue resolution.
- Testing capabilities: Verify response codes, response times with thresholds, and presence of specific response text for thorough validation.
- Flexible test execution: Run tests from multiple geographic locations or directly from your local Glide instance (starting version 1.2), reducing dependency on external runners.
- Monitor overview: Access real-time status, failure and response time charts, historical logs with response details, and related Configuration Items (CIs) for troubleshooting.
- UI enhancements (version 1.2): Improved filtering, bulk editing of monitors, and display of failure counts in overview charts for better usability.
Activation and Requirements
- Installation: Synthetic Monitoring must be requested and installed from the ServiceNow Store.
- Prerequisites: Ensure at least one proxy agent is configured in the Agent Client Collector to monitor service health, unless running tests locally from the Glide instance (version 1.2 and later).
- Configuration: Add monitored endpoints as CIs in the CMDB and configure authentication credentials if required.
Integration with ServiceNow Ecosystem
- Agent Client Collector: Supports use of proxy agents for health monitoring of endpoints.
- Service Operations Workspace: Synthetic Monitoring is accessible within SOW, providing a unified interface for IT Operations Management workflows.
Customer Benefits
ServiceNow customers can leverage Synthetic Monitoring to gain proactive visibility into service endpoint performance without waiting for user reports. Early detection of performance degradations or outages allows for faster remediation, reducing downtime and improving user satisfaction. The integrated dashboards and alerting streamline monitoring workflows and facilitate collaboration with stakeholders through easy sharing of insights.
The ServiceNow® synthetic monitoring application in the Service Operations Workspace (SOW) empowers organizations to proactively manage and enhance the performance and availability of critical service endpoints. By simulating user transactions on HTTP endpoints, this solution identifies performance bottlenecks, helps ensure up-time, and optimizes user experiences. Synthetic monitoring is a new application in the Yokohama release.
Synthetic monitoring highlights for the Yokohama release
- View real-world performance data from your services without needing actual users, catching issues before they're released to production.
- Get real-time notifications for performance degradations or outages before they impact users.
- Visualize synthetic test results and share insights with stakeholders.
See Synthetic monitoring for more information.
Synthetic monitoring features
- Create and edit a synthetic monitor
- Create and manage synthetic tests to replicate end-user transactions for critical service endpoints. Configure an alert to activate when a test fails, enabling you to address issues before they impact users.As of version 1.2, you can:
- Test for response code: Confirm that your endpoints are returning success codes and know when they aren’t.
- Test for response time: Confirm that your services are meeting performance expectations by setting thresholds for response times.
- Test for response text: Validate whether specific content exists in the response body, enabling accurate end-to-end checks.
- Run tests from your local Glide instance: Enable closer integration with your instance and reduce the need for external test runners.
- Run tests from multiple locations.
- Identifying system issues with synthetic monitoring
- View the Overview page for a monitor where you can:
- View the status of the monitor.
- View charts that display test failures and response times.
- Visit related configuration items (CIs) that might be the start to investigating failed tests.
- View a historical log of synthetic test runs, including details and the response body text.
- Share results by exporting a list of tests for a monitor.
UI changes
- Overview and detail pages in SOW.
- Create view and manage your synthetic monitors on the overview and detail pages.As of version 1.2, the following UI enhancements are available:
- Improved filtering for finding your endpoints.
- Bulk editing of monitors.
- Charts on the Overview page now display failures instead of successes.
Activation information
Install synthetic monitoring by requesting it from the ServiceNow Store. Visit the ServiceNow Store website to view all the available apps and for information about submitting requests to the store. For cumulative release notes information for all released apps, see the ServiceNow Store version history release notes.
Additional requirements
- If
you have version 1.0, configure at least one proxy agent on the Agent Client Collector. These agents should be the ones you use to monitor the health and performance of the services to be monitored. For more information about proxy agents, see Using proxy agents in Agent Client Collector.
Starting with version 1.2, you can run tests from your local Glide instance instead of a proxy agent.
- Add CIs in the CMDB for the endpoints that you want to monitor.
- If your endpoints require authentication, configure credentials in the Credentials [discovery_credentials] table.