Analyze impact agentic workflow reference

  • Release version: Australia
  • Updated June 29, 2026
  • 3 minutes to read
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    Summary of Analyze Impact Agentic Workflow Reference

    The Analyze Impact Agentic Workflow in ServiceNow Australia release (updated June 29, 2026) enables automated impact analysis for change requests and incidents by leveraging CMDB topology and AI-assisted summarization. It provides structured insights into how configuration items (CIs) might be affected by a change or incident, helping customers assess potential risks and plan remediation more effectively.

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    Input Modes and Supported Records

    • Change Record Input: Accepts changerequest and incident records, invoked from change records, workspace actions, or workflows with a change context.
    • CI Direct Input: Accepts a CI sysid plus a free-text change description, useful when no change record context exists.
    • Constraints: Only change requests and incidents are supported; other record classes are rejected. Cancelled or closed records (e.g., state 4 Canceled or state 8 Closed) are excluded or handled with fallback logic.

    Input Resolution and Output Schema

    • Impact analysis extracts change descriptions primarily from AI-generated summaries of the task (Objective and Risk for changes; Issue for incidents). If unavailable or inadequate, it falls back to the record’s shortdescription or description fields.
    • The output is a structured list of impacted CIs with the following details:
      • sysId: Unique CI identifier from the CMDB
      • ciName: Display name of the CI
      • ciClass: CI class name
      • impactLevel: Severity categorized as high, medium, low, or none
      • impactType: Category such as availability, performance, security, etc.
      • confidence: Confidence level of the assessment
      • reason: Plain-language explanation including redundancy and propagation insights

    Topology Traversal and System Properties

    • The workflow builds dependency topology using a breadth-first search (BFS) through CMDB relationships, limited by a configurable maximum number of nodes (default 250) to control scope and performance.
    • The sncmdbgenai.impactanalysis.maxtopologynodes system property allows adjusting this limit to balance detail and processing time.

    Limitations and Error Handling

    • The workflow analyzes only CMDB topology semantics; it does not consider historical changes, ongoing incidents, scheduled changes, or business context.
    • Accuracy depends on the quality and detail of change descriptions; vague inputs reduce assessment quality.
    • Common error scenarios include missing CI associations, absent descriptions, or invalid record IDs, each producing clear error messages guiding corrective actions.

    Role and Access Requirements

    • Users need the itil role to read CMDB and change/incident records and to invoke the workflow from the Now Assist panel.
    • Access to the Now Assist panel from workspace or application is also required; administrators should be contacted if the panel is not visible.

    Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

    This agentic workflow helps customers quickly identify which CIs might be impacted by a change or incident, understand the severity and type of impact, and receive explanations for the assessment. It supports proactive risk management by visualizing dependencies and prioritizing mitigation efforts, all integrated seamlessly within ServiceNow’s change and incident management processes.

    Reference information for the analyze impact agentic workflow, including input modes, output schema, supported record types, constraints, and system properties.

    Input modes

    Table 1. Input modes
    Mode Inputs When to use
    Change record
    • change_request (Change)
    • incident (Incident)
    		 Invoked from a change record, workspace action, or agentic workflow with a change record in context
    CI directly ciSysId (sys_id of cmdb_ci) + changeDescription (free text) Invoked from a CI record, agentic workflow, or workspace action without a change record
    CI_SYSID and Change context

    Supported record types

    For invocation by change record, the agentic workflow processes these record types:

    • change_request (Change)
    • incident (Incident)

    Any other record class is rejected. Additionally, cancelled or closed records aren't processed:

    • Change requests in state 4 (Canceled) are rejected
    • Change requests in state 5 (New) skip LLM-based summarization; the agentic workflow uses record fields as fallback
    • Incidents in state 8 (Closed) are rejected

    Input resolution

    For invocation by change record, the agentic workflow extracts the change description by using an AI summary of the task. The summary includes:

    • For change_request: Objective and Risk sections from the change summary
    • For incident: Issue section from the incident summary

    If the task summary is unavailable or does not match the expected schema (for example, a New-state change request with no summary content available), the analyze impact agentic workflow falls back to the record's short_description or description field.

    Output schema

    The analyze impact agentic workflow returns a structured list of impacted items. Each item has the following schema:

    Table 2. Impact analysis output schema
    Field Values Description
    sysId String CI sys_id from CMDB topology (unique identifier; for example, a1b2c3d4e5f6g7h8)
    ciName String CI display name (for example, "web-node-01" or "payment-gateway-prod")
    ciClass String CI class name (for example, "cmdb_ci_linux_server", "cmdb_ci_app_server", "cmdb_ci_db_instance")
    impactLevel high | medium | low | none Severity of impact on this CI
    impactType availability | performance | data-integrity | functional | security | operational | none Category of impact (for example, availability loss, performance degradation)
    confidence high | medium | low Confidence in the assessment
    reason String Plain-language explanation including redundancy assessment and propagation reasoning

    Topology traversal

    The analyze impact agentic workflow builds the dependency topology using a three-phase breadth-first search (BFS) through the CMDB relationship table (cmdb_rel_ci):
    1. Resolve inputs.
    2. Fetch topology.
    3. Invoke LLM.

    System properties

    Table 3. Impact Analysis system properties
    Property Default Description
    sn_cmdb_gen_ai.impact_analysis.max_topology_nodes 250 Maximum number of CI nodes to include in the CMDB topology traversal. When the limit is reached, traversal terminates and only the accumulated nodes are sent to the LLM for impact assessment.

    Limitations

    The analyze impact agentic workflow considers only the semantics of CMDB topology. It does not include data on similar past changes, ongoing incidents, upcoming scheduled changes, or business context.

    LLM reasoning accuracy depends on the richness and clarity of the change description provided. Short or vague descriptions produce lower-quality impact assessments.

    Error handling

    Table 4. Error scenarios and responses
    Situation Response
    Change record exists but has no associated CI Error: cannot determine topology — change record has no CI
    Change record has no description (and fallback fails) Error: change record has no description. Populate the change record's description or risk fields and try again.
    Provided change_id does not exist Error: change record not found
    Provided CI sys_id does not exist in CMDB Error: CI not found
    CI exists but has no upstream dependencies Empty impact list (valid result, not an error)

    Role requirements

    Access to the analyze impact agentic workflow requires the itil role to:

    • Read CMDB CI records and CI relationship data
    • Read change request and incident records
    • Invoke the Impact Analysis agentic workflow from the Now Assist panel

    Additionally, users must have access to open the Now Assist panel from their workspace or application. Contact your administrator if you can't see the Now Assist icon.