Item diagnostic report

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Item diagnostic report

    The Item Diagnostic Report helps ServiceNow customers assess the health and configuration compliance of catalog items against ServiceNow recommended practices. It provides a health score for each item and lists diagnostic results highlighting any violations found. A lower score indicates better compliance, with 0 being ideal. The report assists in identifying and correcting issues to ensure optimal catalog performance and expected behavior.

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    Key Features

    • Health Score: Measures the number and severity of violations for a catalog item, with different rules weighted by importance.
    • Diagnostic Result Entries: Each entry includes the rule violated, the record causing the violation, and the count of violations.
    • Default Diagnostic Rules: The report checks compliance with several key rules, including:
      • checkUserCriteriaUsage: Ensures entitlements are used instead of user criteria.
      • checkBalancedContainers: Verifies that container start and end variables are balanced.
      • checkDuplicateVariables: Detects variables with duplicate names linked to the item or variable sets.
      • checkDOMManipulation: Identifies client scripts manipulating the DOM, which is discouraged due to potential upgrade issues.
      • checkLookupVariableRowCount: Flags lookup variables run on large tables that may cause slow load times.
      • checkAJAX: Lists AJAX calls in client scripts; asynchronous calls are allowed but may introduce delay.
      • checkSelectBoxUnique: Detects Select Box variables configured to show only unique entries.
      • checkOrderGuideRuleBaseCount: Checks for a high number of active rule bases in order guides, which can slow performance.
      • checkFormatterVariablesUsage: Identifies use of Macro, Macro with label, and UI Page variable types.

    Practical Use for ServiceNow Customers

    By running the Item Diagnostic Results report, customers can proactively detect catalog items that deviate from best practices, enabling them to:

    • Improve catalog item performance and user experience by addressing violations.
    • Maintain stability and compatibility across ServiceNow releases by avoiding unsupported configurations like DOM manipulation.
    • Optimize load times by managing variables and rule bases properly.
    • Ensure adherence to recommended design standards, reducing future maintenance and troubleshooting efforts.

    Overall, this report is a valuable tool for maintaining a healthy, efficient, and reliable service catalog environment.

    For a catalog item data and configuration, you can identify possible violations from the ServiceNow recommended practices.

    The item diagnostic report includes a score that measures the health of the item, and a list of diagnostic result entries. These entries consist of a rule, a document (record that violates the rule), and a count (the number of violations in the record).

    Correct violations for best performance and to maintain expected behavior.

    The lower the score, the better (0 is ideal). A higher score means that an item has more violations from the ServiceNow recommended practices. Each rule has a different weight and level of importance. For example, a violation of duplicate variables is more likely to result in user issues. An AJAX usage violation is less likely to cause issues since the result could simply cause a delay in the UI.diagnostic results

    Default diagnostic rules

    These diagnostic rules are designed as per ServiceNow recommended practices.

    Table 1. Default diagnostic rules
    Rule Description
    checkUserCriteriaUsage Identifies if the item is using entitlements instead of user criteria
    checkBalancedContainers Checks if the Container Start and Container End variables are balanced.
    checkDuplicateVariables Identifies variables with the same name associated to a catalog item (or an associated variable set).
    checkDOMManipulation Identifies any DOM violation in catalog client scripts. The DOM is not guaranteed to be the same between releases and can affect catalog client scripts during upgrades. Therefore, it is not recommended for customers to do any kind of DOM manipulation.

    You can view detailed information for each client script by clicking the information icon.
    checkLookupVariableRowCount Checks if the Lookup variable is run on tables with many records as it can lead to slower load times.
    checkAJAX Identifies all AJAX calls in catalog client scripts because, although AJAX calls in catalog client scripts are allowed, they must be asynchronous. All AJAX calls are listed because even asynchronous calls can cause some delay.

    You can view detailed information for each client script by clicking the information icon.
    checkSelectBoxUnique Identifies Select Box type variables that have the attribute enabled to show only unique entries in the select box.
    checkOrderGuideRuleBaseCount Checks for high number of active rule bases in an order guide as higher number of rule bases can lead to slower load times
    checkFormatterVariablesUsage Checks if the item has the following variable types:
    • Macro
    • Macro with label
    • UI Page

    For information on the variable availability across various channels, see Variable support in various channels.

    diagnostic details