Platform Investigate IT problems agentic workflow

  • Release version: Xanadu
  • Updated February 7, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Platform Investigate IT problems agentic workflow

    The Platform Investigate IT problems agentic workflow enables ServiceNow customers to leverage AI agents to perform root cause analysis and risk assessments for IT problems. This workflow assists agents and subject matter experts in investigating complex problems linked to multiple incidents by extracting insights from related incident and problem data. It helps generate actionable resolution plans, streamlining problem investigation within the IT landscape.

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    The workflow and its AI agents, tools, and triggers are provided through Now Assist applications. Customers can activate the workflow by enabling the associated triggers and displaying the Now Assist panel. To customize instructions, customers should duplicate and modify the workflow before activation.

    Prerequisites and Setup

    • Now Assist for Platform must be installed, which is included with any Now Assist application such as Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM).
    • There must be existing Problem and Incident records in the instance, as the workflow analyzes these tables.

    After activation in AI Agent Studio, users can initiate the workflow by entering commands like investigate the problem PRB001 in the Now Assist panel or the AI Agent Studio Testing page (requires sn.aiaadmin role).

    Troubleshooting

    When a problem has many related incidents, users may encounter a token limit error due to the maximum context length for Now Assist skills. This limit cannot currently be bypassed. If this occurs, try investigating a different problem with fewer related incidents.

    AI Agents Involved

    The core AI agent in this workflow is the Problem investigator, which:

    • Identifies root causes of problems
    • Performs impact assessments
    • Plans resolutions to address the problem

    Additional Resources

    For customers interested in expanding their use of AI-driven workflows, additional Platform agentic workflows are available to support various IT operational needs.

    Use the Platform Investigate IT problem AI agents agentic workflow to perform root cause and risk assessments so that you can create an actionable resolution plan for a problem.

    Investigate IT problems overview

    The Investigate IT problems agentic workflow can help to assist agents and subject matter experts (SMEs) in investigating problems in their IT landscape. A problem can be associated with many incidents, and any investigator must be aware of a large number of details when looking at a problem. The agentic workflow can help provide insights from the incident and problem details and suggest plans or possible solutions.

    The agents, tools, and triggers that are associated with the investigate IT problems agentic workflow are provided by Now Assist applications. You can activate the agentic workflow template by making triggers active and setting the display settings to include the Now Assist panel. If you want to change this agentic workflow's instructions, you must duplicate it, adjust the settings to suit your specific needs, and activate the duplicated version of the agentic workflow instead.

    Prerequisites and set up

    To access this workflow, you must have Now Assist for Platform installed on your instance, which you can get if you install any other Now Assist application, such as Now Assist for IT Service Management (ITSM).

    Because this agentic workflow analyzes problems and incidents related to those problems, you must have records on the Problem and Incident table.

    Sample utterance

    After the workflow has been activated in AI Agent Studio, enter investigate the problem PRB001 or similar phrases in the Now Assist panel to trigger the workflow. You can also run this workflow on the Testing page of AI Agent Studio with the same utterance in the Task field if you have the sn.aia_admin role.

    Troubleshooting

    If a Problem has a large number of related incidents, you may run into an error that states "This model's maximum context length is 128000 tokens. However, your messages resulted in [X] tokens. Please reduce the length of the messages." This maximum token count is in place for all Now Assist skills, so there is currently no way to work around this error. You can try the agentic workflow again using a different Problem.

    AI agents used in the Investigate IT problems agentic workflow

    Table 1. AI agents names and descriptions in the Investigate IT problems agentic workflow
    AI agent name AI agent description
    Problem investigator Identifies the root causes, performs an impact assessment, and plans resolutions.

    Other Platform agentic workflows

    For more information on other agentic workflows associated with the Platform workflow, see Platform agentic workflows.