Business hours

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 3 minutes to read
    • Summarize
    Summarized using AI
    This content was generated using new OpenAI-powered functionality. Results are provided on an as is basis and are not guaranteed to be accurate or complete.

    Summary of Business hours

    The Business hours feature in ServiceNow’s Cloud Cost Management helps optimize cloud resource usage by identifying resources running outside designated business hours, reporting on them, and automating their start and stop schedules. This reduces cloud expenses by ensuring resources operate only when needed. It supports AWS and GCP databases (with Azure support limited to compute resources).

    Show full answer Show less

    Business Hours jobs are triggered after each successful Billing Download job, analyzing usage and spend data to update actionable recommendations and reports. This process integrates with ServiceNow Change Management to automate or manually approve resource on/off scheduling.

    How Business Hours Works

    • For each policy, the system examines the CMDB to find matching resources based on defined criteria.
    • Business Hours reports display spend for usage during business and non-business hours over the last 30 days.
    • Depending on the policy’s approval type (manual or auto), change requests are generated either per resource or as a bulk change request to enforce scheduled start/stop operations.
    • Once approved, the schedule is applied to the resources.
    • AWS Auto Scaling Group (ASG) instances are excluded to avoid conflicts with scaling operations, visible under excluded resources.
    • GCP Managed Instance Groups (MIGs) are supported and benefit from automated scaling and availability features.

    Business Hours Policy Configuration

    Policies define when resources should be powered on/off and specify resource matching criteria such as cloud provider, service account, and tags (e.g., Department = Finance). For example, a Finance department policy might:

    • Be active and run whenever billing data updates.
    • Require manual approval for change requests (Normal Change).
    • Set business hours from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM with defined power-on and power-off flows.
    • Target AWS resources with a specific service account and tag.

    After approval, resources start and stop according to the schedule, with slight timing variations due to system conditions.

    Approval Types and Effects

    • Auto-approval (Standard Change): Automatically generates, approves, and applies change requests and schedules, updating Business Hours reports.
    • Manual approval (Normal Change): Generates change requests requiring approval by users with the appropriate role; schedules are applied post-approval.
    • Report-only: Generates recommendations and reports without applying any schedule changes.

    Additional Considerations

    • Business Hours operations are repeated each time billing data is refreshed to keep schedules and reports current.
    • Excluding resources from Business Hours and Cloud Cost Management reports is possible to tailor analysis and automation.
    • Integration with Change Management ensures governance and control over automated resource operations.

    A Business hours job applies policies to identify resources that are running when they should be powered off, reports them, and can start and stop them on a schedule that you specify. Running only during specified business hours can significantly reduce your cloud spend.

    The insights_admin role can create policies for AWS and GCP databases.
    Note:
    Azure only supports compute, not database.

    How the Business hours feature works

    Each successful execution of a Billing Download job triggers the Budget Forecast, Business Hours, Reservation Plans, Rightsizing, and Unused resources jobs to analyze the spend and usage data and to update the actionable recommendations in the reports. Business Hours jobs follow this process.
    Figure 1. How the Business Hours feature works
    Process flow for Business Hours
    1. For each Business hours policy, examine the CMDB to identify resources that match the policy criteria.
    2. For each resource that matches a policy, update Business hours reports that show spend for business hours and non-business hours usage for the last 30 days.
    3. Business hours operations are directly integrated with the ServiceNow® Change Management feature. For Manual Approval or Auto-approval policy types, generate change requests to enforce the on/off schedule that is defined in the policy. Either of the following, depending on policy settings:
      • Generate a change request for each resource that matches a policy.
      • Generate a single change request that applies to all CIs that match the policy.
    4. When a change request is approved, schedule the on/off actions for the associated resources as specified in the policy.
    5. Repeat the process whenever billing data is updated.
    Important:
    AWS only:
    • AWS Auto Scaling group (ASG) operations act to maintain minimum capacity for ASG-member resources. To avoid conflicts with ASG operations, the Cloud Cost Management app excludes all instances that are part of an Auto Scaling group from Business Hours operations.
    • You can view ASG-member resources on the Excluded Resources tab for Business Hours.

    Google Cloud only: The instance can be defined as a Managed instance groups (MIGs). MIGs let you operate applications on multiple identical VMs. You can make your workloads scalable and highly available by taking advantage of automated MIG services, including: auto-scaling, auto-healing, regional (multiple zone) deployment, and automatic updating.

    Business hours policy

    Business Hours policy example

    The Finance department policy example has the following settings:
    • The policy is active, which is applied every time billing and usage data is updated.
    • The approval type is Manual approval (Normal Change), which means that, after a qualified user approves the change request, the schedule for resources that match the policy is adjusted.
    • The Business hours (on/off) schedule is ON from 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM.
    • The power-on and power-off flows are specified.
    • Only resources that meet the following resource criteria match the policy:
      • The cloud provider is AWS and the service account is Billing 15970.
      • The resource has a tag with the name Department with the value Finance.

    After the policy is applied, for each resource that matches the policy and where the change request was approved, the system starts the resource at 8:00AM and stops it at 5:00PM. The actual start and stop times vary slightly due to changes in system demand and the time that it takes for the resource to start and stop.

    Result of the example Business Hours policy

    Business hours approval types

    For each resource that matches the policy criteria, the actions that the policy takes depend on the approval type:

    Auto-approval (Standard Change) approval type
    • Generate a recommendation to apply the specified business hours and add the resource to the Business hours reports.
    • Generate and then auto-approve a change request for the change group.
    • Add the resource to the Business hours reports.
    • Apply the Business hours schedule to the resource.
    Manual approval (Normal Change) approval type
    • Generate a recommendation to apply the specified business hours schedule and add the resource to the Business hours reports.
    • Generate a change request for members of the change group.
    • Add the resource to the Business hours reports.
    • Any member of the group with the sn_change_write role can approve the change request.
    • When approved, apply the Business hours schedule to the resource.
    Report-only approval type
    • Generate a recommendation to apply the specified business hours.
    • Add the resource to the Business hours reports.