User Experience

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated March 12, 2026
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of User Experience

    The User Experience feature in Instance Observer provides real-time user monitoring and performance insights tailored for Impact Total customers. It enables you to analyze user experience at multiple levels—including node, transaction type, URL, and user breakdowns—to quickly identify and address performance issues, outages, or service degradations.

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    This monitoring capability allows you to visualize your user base based on transaction volumes, detect problematic URLs causing slow response times, and pinpoint users impacted by performance issues. The dashboard presents key metrics such as transaction count, response times, and unique user counts with historical trends and visual graphs for quick understanding.

    Key Features

    • Transaction and User Analytics: View current transaction counts, response times, and user activity with trend indicators. Identify the top 100 most active users with anonymized IDs, color-coded to highlight those exceeding transaction thresholds.
    • Node and Application Performance Monitoring: Visual tiles show node performance by response time, with color coding to highlight nodes exceeding average response times. Track application performance using metrics like total transaction processing time, semaphore wait time, UI time, network latency, and content download time.
    • Interactive Data Exploration: Drill down into node transaction counts and response times via graphs, enabling detailed investigation of specific performance events.
    • Manage User Experience: Explore in-depth transactions for specific users or nodes over selected periods, providing granular insights for troubleshooting.
    • Platform Performance Analyzer Integration: Gain detailed visibility into application operational metrics such as the number of applications per instance, page-level response times, user interaction frequency, and page access frequency.

    Key Outcomes

    • Rapid identification and visualization of user experience issues and performance bottlenecks across your ServiceNow instance.
    • Improved ability to isolate slow URLs, nodes, or transactions causing degraded service, enabling faster root cause analysis.
    • Enhanced monitoring of application response times with the ability to drill down to individual transaction IDs, supporting detailed performance tuning.
    • Support for anonymized user data collection with an option for administrators to opt-in for non-anonymized data when needed.
    • Note that User Experience monitoring is not available in certain restricted environments such as FedRAMP, NSC DOD IL5, Australia IRAP-Protected datacenters, self-hosted instances, or managed service providers.

    Explore real-time user monitoring to analyze user experience and performance insights in Instance Observer​ telemetry into node, transaction type, URL, and user level breakdowns for Impact Total customers.

    • Access the User Experience to visualize quickly your user base issues based on transaction type and volume, outage or service degradations, and access the specific affected URL​ for Impact Total customers.
    • Search for a specific URL that is causing increases in transaction response time.​
    • Analyze node and transaction type level data for outliers and trending​ transactions.
    • Identify which users are impacted by an outage or service degradation.​
    • Quickly visualize your user base based on transaction volume.​
    • Monitor your applications for performance issues and track the cause of performance issues.

    The overview page breaks down user history and transaction count into various widgets and charts into a dashboard view.

    Overview page with populated chart data for the selected instance and timeframe.

    Table 1. User Experience overview
    Data type Description
    • Transaction count
    • Transaction response time
    • Unique user count
    • Max response time
    		 Displays the current value, a percentage of decrease or increase in historical trend, and a visual graph of the activity.
    Top 100 most active users
    • Hover on a user block to see an encrypted user ID and the number of transaction reports for that time period.
      • Green blocks represent users without a threshold warning
      • Red blocks indicate a transaction volume that surpasses the general threshold.
    • Select a user block to view the details of the entry.
    Note:
    The user ID is anonymized. Administrators have the capability to opt-in to the collection of non-anonymized data.
    Node performance by response time
    • Hover on a tile to see the node name and the response time for that node.
      • Green blocks represent nodes with average response times.
      • Red blocks indicate increased response time outside of average parameters for the node.
    • Select a node block to view the details of the entry.
    Application performance by response time Track applications that have performance issues by using the average response time metric.
    The metrics are:
    • Total transaction processing time
    • Total semaphore wait time
    • Total UI time (Average response time)
    • Network latency
    • Content download time

    For more information, see Track of application response time to monitor performance.
    Node transaction count Select a point on the graph to view additional actions and drill into the transaction details.
    Node response time Select a point on the graph to view additional actions and drill into the transaction details.
    Note:
    User Experience in Instance Observer may not be available to customers in the FedRAMP, NSC DOD IL5, or Australia IRAP-Protected datacenters, to self-hosted customers, or in other restricted environments, or to managed service providers.