In the previous blog in this series, we talked about how to prevent health and performance issues using the three pillars of health. In this blog, we take a closer look at identifying and correcting health issues.

Investing in prevention means that you’ll experience fewer platform health issues. However, it’s equally important to be able to quickly identify and correct health issues when they happen. The three pillars work together to let you do this as well. Part of this is using the Instance Observer and Health Assessment pillars, but, as we’ll see in a minute, Experts on Demand also help you to keep your ServiceNow instances running smoothly.

Let’s start with Instance Observer. Remember, this is the health dashboard for your ServiceNow instances. It lets you identify health and performance issues in real time, and it also shows you trends and anomalies that can lead to issues down the road. This includes:

• Instance availability. With Instance Observer, you can see at a glance whether any of your instances aren’t available. Since Instance Observer is an off-instance application, you’ll always be able to see this because it doesn’t run on your instances.
• Near real-time telemetry. Instance Observer monitors all of your instances and automatically highlights abnormal KPIs in an easy-to-understand triage dashboard, covering areas such as transactions, jobs, services, schedules, semaphores, update sets, and more.
• Historical insights. Instance Observer includes performance charts and reports that let you see how instance health is trending over time. For instance, you can easily see if there are periodic spikes in transaction times, or if there was an abnormal change in database growth after you applied an update set. You can then drill into underlying details, such as the jobs and transactions that were running when a spike occurred. It also includes detailed analytics—for example, you can compare performance before and after a release.
• Performance anomaly detection. Instance Observer uses AI to automatically detect health and performance anomalies that aren’t easy to see simply by looking at historical charts. For instance, if a KPI is still within acceptable limits but has suddenly deviated from its historical behavior, Instance Observer detects this.
• Alerts. Instance Observer lets you set up alerts, so you’re automatically notified when there’s a health or performance issue. For example, you can set an alert threshold on a specific KPI or create an alert for anomalies that Instance Observer detects using AI.

Also, keep in mind that Instance Observer monitors both your production and preproduction instances. This allows you to prevent health issues by detecting them in test before you put changes into production.

Diagnosing issues with a Health Assessment

As we said in the first blog in this series, a Health Assessment is like a diagnostic tool for your car. You should schedule Heath Assessments on a regular basis. A Health Assessment covers five major areas, including:

• Manageability: This helps you to reduce the amount of time you spend on platform administration by looking at how you configure ServiceNow and manage your data. For example, it analyzes how your CMDB is populated, how much code you’ve written, and how many update sets you’ve created.
• Performance ​:This helps you provide a better user experience by making sure your instances are fast and responsive. Examples include identifying inefficient scripting techniques, poorly optimized report queries, and forms that take too long to load.
• Security: This make sure that your instance and the data it contains is secure. For instance, it checks whether the right security plug-ins are enabled, whether you’ve set appropriate security properties, and if you have the right access control rules in place.
• Upgradeability ​:A number of issues can make it hard to upgrade your ServiceNow instances. A Health Assessment identifies these issues, such as modifications to baseline platform capabilities and use of deprecated APIs.
• User experience: Customizations and poor configuration can negatively affect user experiences. A Health Assessment identifies common user experience issues, such as forms that are too big, navigation bars that are cluttered with useless information, and poorly designed or inefficient processes.

The Health Assessment will give you a list of findings along with recommended actions to address each finding. You can access these findings directly in the Impact IDE, and your Impact Squad will also spend time with you going over the findings.

There’s one last thing to note on Health Assessments. While you should always request an assessment if you have a platform health issue, you can ask for one at any time. For example, it’s a good idea to request one when you’re preparing for an upgrade and after you’ve upgraded. Many ServiceNow Impact customers also request regular assessments on a monthly or quarterly basis.

How else does Impact help you identify and correct health issues?

With Impact, you have access to premium 24x7 support, as well as a support account manager who’s part of your Impact Squad. They are your champion with our support team, and they’re also your point person for case management and escalations.

There are also other ways you can access Experts on Demand to help you identify and correct health issues. These include:

• TuneUp Accelerators. These are Impact Accelerators that address specific platform capabilities and ServiceNow products. Many of these are designed to help you improve the health of your platform. For example, the TuneUp Your CMDB Accelerator analyzes common CMDB problem areas, provides recommendations on how to address these, and explains leading practices that improve the effectiveness of your data foundation. You can find a catalog of available TuneUp Accelerators here.
• Developer Support. If you’re an Advanced or Total Impact customer, you’re also entitled to Developer Support. Your developers can work with a ServiceNow expert to troubleshoot customizations of out-of-the-box ServiceNow apps, as well as your own custom apps. This is a break/fix service you can use if you have a customization that was working previously and has now stopped working. However, it doesn’t include help with designing or implementing new customizations, and it isn’t a code review or testing service. It also doesn’t cover third-party apps running on the ServiceNow platform.

The bottom line

Keeping your ServiceNow instances healthy and running at peak performance is critical. With the three pillars of Impact platform health, you have ServiceNow with you every step of the way. By combining the power of Instance Observer, the Health Assessment Accelerator, and Experts on Demand, you can prevent, identify, and correct platform health issues, so you deliver great user experiences, lower cost of ownership, and make your platform secure.