Working with SRM services

Release version: Zurich

Updated July 31, 2025

2 minutes to read

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Summary of Working with SRM services

In ServiceNow's Service Reliability Management (SRM), aservicerepresents a functional outcome such as networking, payments, or HR services, owned by a team. Each service can include technical components or shared infrastructure elements. SRM helps prioritize and route alerts from integrated monitoring tools to the correct responders, escalating issues until acknowledged and addressed.

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Services in SRM must correspond to actual services in your infrastructure, and multiple tool integrations can be configured to monitor these services comprehensively. Associating teams and policies with each service streamlines responsibility allocation and automates response actions, enhancing focus on notifications and timings.

Key Features

Service Overview Tab: Displays critical metrics about services such as the count of services managed, those with active incidents or critical alerts, services undergoing changes, and those with low error budgets (less than 25% remaining).
Service List View: Customizable columns provide details like service name, class, business criticality, number of open alerts/incidents, and remaining error budget percentage. Users can filter, group, sort, edit, and export this list to fit operational needs.
Error Budget: Represents the allowable service level objective (SLO) consumption over time, useful for managing release velocity and prioritizing reliability efforts.
Service Reliability Dashboard: Offers a customizable, high-level visualization of service performance to track reliability trends effectively.
Service Lifecycle Management: Enables adding new services, editing existing ones with team and support details, and removing services when monitoring is no longer needed.
Integrations Launchpad: Facilitates connections between SRM and various monitoring tools, ensuring alert and incident data flow into SRM for comprehensive service health management.

Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

By leveraging SRM services, customers can:

Gain visibility into the reliability and health of critical business services.
Effectively prioritize and manage incidents and alerts based on business impact and error budgets.
Streamline operational responsibilities by linking services with supporting teams and automated policies.
Use integrations to unify monitoring data and improve incident response workflows.
Manage service lifecycle within SRM to align service tracking with evolving infrastructure and business needs.

A service represents a functional outcome like networking, payments, or HR services, that is owned by a team. To deliver that outcome, a service can contain one or more technical components like a user authentication service, or a piece of shared infrastructure like a database.

Service Reliability Management (SRM) works with integrations to prioritize and route alerts to the relevant responders. It follows up with escalations until the alert is acknowledged and someone responds. When you create or add a service in SRM, it must reflect a service in your SRM infrastructure.

Note:

You might want multiple tool integrations to monitor each technology management service and receive events from those tools. See Working with integrations in SRM for more information.

In addition, you can create reliability metrics for the service. See Working with reliability metrics.

Tying a team and policies to that service makes it easier to divide responsibilities and track technical outcomes. It also makes it easier to automate response routines and focus on who you notify and when.

The state of an exiting service is inherited. The state of a created service in SRM is None.

Services Overview

Services page showing the list of your services — Figure 1. Information on the Overview tab

The cards on the Overview tab display the following metrics. By default, the list view shows information related to the Your services card. Select a different card to view different information in the list view.

Your services: Count of all the services you or your team manages and monitors for reliability.
Services with active incidents: Services with open incidents sorted in the following order:
- Business criticality - most critical first.
- Number of active incidents - highest first.
- Percentage of error budget remaining - lowest first.
Services with critical alerts: Services with open alerts sorted in the following order:
- Business criticality - most critical first.
- Number of alerts - highest first.
- Percentage of error budget remaining - lowest first.
Services with open changes: All the services your team manages and monitors.
Services with low error budget: Services with less than 25% error budget remaining.
The error budget metric is represented as the amount of service level objective (SLO) that you can spend over a specified time. It can be used to manage release velocity.

Note:

To refresh the card and list values, select Refresh

You can interact with the list in the following ways:

Group or filter columns to customize the view.
Edit, sort, or export the list as needed. See Export list information to a file.

For more information about individual service details, see Edit service details form.

Services list view definitions

The columns include the following details:

Service: Name of the service.
Class: Service instance or technology management service.
Business criticality: Importance of the service to the business.
Open alerts: Number of open alerts assigned to the service.
Open incidents: Number of open incidents assigned to the service.
Error budget remaining: Percentage of error budget remaining for the service.

Service reliability

The Service reliability tab is a customizable dashboard showing high-level service performance. For more information about the dashboard, see Visualizations in the Service reliability dashboard.