Analyze potential impact agentic workflow

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated August 5, 2025
  • 4 minutes to read
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    Summary of Analyze Potential Impact Agentic Workflow

    The Analyze Potential Impact agentic workflow in ServiceNow’s Zurich release helps you assess how a change request might affect operational servers and associated services. By using this workflow, you gain AI-driven insights into the potential impact on up to 10 relevant servers and up to 3 related services, enabling more informed decision-making about change management actions.

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    Key Features

    • AI-Powered Impact Analysis: The Analyze Potential Impact Agent uses AI to identify and prioritize servers and services potentially impacted by a change request.
    • Workflow Steps: The agent verifies prerequisites, identifies the active change request, selects affected servers, matches them with suggested services, and generates a prioritized impact summary.
    • Integration with Now Assist: Results are displayed in the Now Assist panel and saved automatically to the change request’s work notes for auditability and traceability.
    • Service Mapping Now Assist Skills: Two AI-driven skills enhance analysis by identifying service candidates and assessing their impact based on process characteristics and service dependencies.
    • Service Mapping Candidate Skill: Automatically classifies and describes application service candidates, providing detailed process information and generating service names and descriptions.
    • Service Mapping Candidates Impact Skill: Produces comprehensive impact assessments by analyzing service connection topology and dependencies, helping predict cascading effects across infrastructure components.
    • Default Activation: This agentic workflow and associated skills are enabled by default to provide immediate value without manual configuration.

    Practical Considerations

    • The workflow excludes non-operational or retired servers, focusing analysis on active infrastructure.
    • Currently, domain-separated instances are not supported by this workflow.
    • For best results, conduct all interactions in English.

    Key Outcomes

    • Quick identification of servers and services that may be impacted by a change request, helping to mitigate risks.
    • Detailed AI-generated descriptions and impact summaries that improve understanding of infrastructure dependencies.
    • Automatic documentation of impact analysis within the change request for transparency and future reference.
    • Improved confidence in change decision-making through data-driven insights into potential service disruptions.

    The analyze potential impact agentic workflow analyzes how a change request might impact servers and suggested services. This analysis helps you make informed decisions about the next steps regarding the change request.

    Analyze potential impact agentic workflow overview

    Using the analyze potential impact agentic workflow, the analyze potential impact AI agent produces an analysis of potentially impacted relevant servers and suggested services.
    Note:
    Relevant servers refer to those servers that are currently operational and in use, excluding any non-operational or retired servers.

    AI agent used in the analyze potential impact agentic workflow

    Table 1. AI Agent and its role
    AI Agent AI Agent role
    Analyze Potential Impact Agent Analyzes the potential impact of a change on relevant servers and services and generate an impact analysis.

    Generating the impact analysis

    The analyze potential impact agentic workflow in Now Assist uses a single agent to evaluate the potential impact of a change request. When you select the analyze potential impact AI agent in the Now Assist panel, it initiates the workflow as follows:
    • Prerequisite verification - The agent first verifies that all prerequisites have been met.
    • Change request identification - If you have a change request open, the agent retrieves the change request number from the current active page. Otherwise, it prompts you to provide the change request number.
    • Server selection- The agent selects up to 10 affected servers from the affected configuration items (CIs) in the change request.
    • Match identification - The agent identifies matches between servers and suggested services.
    • Impact analysis - Eventually, the agent prioritizes and displays up to 10 impacted relevant servers, giving priority to servers that are part of suggested services, and up to 3 impacted suggested services. Additionally, the agent provides you with a summary about each suggested service and how it might be impacted by related servers. This information is displayed in the Now Assist panel.
    • Saving the impact analysis - The analysis generated by the Analyze potential impact agentic workflow is saved to the change request work notes.

    To learn more about using the workflow, see Use the Analyze potential impact agentic workflow to assess a change request.

    Analyze potential impact agentic workflow sample reportImpact analysis report generated by the agentic workflow.

    Domain separation

    Currently, the analyze potential impact agentic workflow doesn’t support instances with domain separation. For optimal results, conduct all conversations in English.

    Service Mapping Now Assist Skills

    Service Mapping Now Assist skills are intelligent capabilities that enhance the Analyze potential impact agentic workflow. These skills leverage generative AI to identify, classify, and assess the impact of changes to your IT infrastructure.

    Service Mapping provides two primary Gen AI skills:
    • Service Mapping Candidate
    • Service Mapping Candidates Impact
    These Service Mapping Now Assist skills are active by default. For information on activating inactive skills, see:

    Service Mapping Candidate skill

    This skill automatically identifies and names processes and application service candidates by analyzing process characteristics, commands, and parameters. It provides detailed descriptions and categorization to help you understand which services are running in your environment.

    The skill uses a two-stage process:

    1. In the process classification stage, the agent uses the skill to analyze individual processes within an application service candidate. The agent uses the skill to extract:
      • Publisher: The company or organization that released the product. For example: "Project Calico".
      • Product: The specific product name. For example: "Calico".
      • Description: Detailed explanation of what the process does. For example: "BIRD (BIRD Internet Routing Daemon) process running as part of Calico networking solution for Kubernetes and container orchestration. This process handles BGP routing functionality with remote control socket enabled, running as a daemon with specific Calico configuration for pod-to-pod networking and network policy enforcement."
      • Service Hints: Keywords that help identify the service type. For example: "bird,calico,BGP,routing,daemon,networking,kubernetes,container,policy,socket".
    2. In the service information generation stage, the agent combines process details with load balancer information to generate:
      • Service Name: A concise, accurate name for the service candidate. For example: "Calico BGP Routing Service".
      • Service Description: A comprehensive description of the service's purpose. For example: "BIRD Internet Routing Daemon process running as part of Project Calico's networking solution for Kubernetes container orchestration. This service handles BGP routing functionality for pod-to-pod networking and network policy enforcement, operating as a daemon with remote control socket capabilities. The component is connected through Calico's container networking infrastructure to provide routing services in Kubernetes environments".
      • G2 Category: Industry-standard categorization from G2.com. For example: "Container Networking".

    Service Mapping Candidates Impact skill

    This skill generates comprehensive impact assessments when changes are made to your infrastructure. It analyzes service connections and dependencies to predict how a change to a single component might affect other services and servers, and provides a summary of the impact analysis.

    The skill analyzes:
    • Connection Topology: How servers within a service candidate are connected.
    • Affected Servers: Which servers are directly impacted by a change.
    Based on the candidate number, and the analysis, the output summary is provided per a service candidate. For example:
    • Service candidate: "bird [ASC000000015]".
    • Impact: "Network routing disruption affecting pod-to-pod communication across Kubernetes cluster nodes due to Calico Bird BGP routing daemon failure on p-kubenode1-2, potentially causing connectivity issues for workloads on connected nodes p-kubenode1-3, p-kubenode1-4, and p-kubenode1-5".
    Important:
    This agentic workflow is turned on by default. For more information, see Now Assist skills, agents, and agentic workflows on by default.