ServiceNow Maintenance and Optimization

It is usually experienced: Once the ServiceNow implementation has completed and you start consuming your slice of cake post go-live and get busy in day to day activities. When you get involved in performing set of activities and continual changes are incorporated in the process, performance gets impacted by little things which at times are not given attention to.

Instance maintenance is not an inordinate process.

Why not consider a point of time, twice a year to review the ServiceNow instance?

Adopting a procedure of instance review for data and processes, will help keep the instance healthy like the go-live health.

Reviewing the instance is a good practice. It helps to deactivate the workflows, remove things which are not in use. This helps to improve instance performance and user experience. Places to be investigated:

Patch/ Upgrade Maintenance

Security patches contain a lot of fixes related to instance security and should be applied as released. SNOW lets you remain behind only two releases and few patches.

Clear Out

Schedule Jobs: Schedule jobs consume a lot of process. Analyzing the schedule jobs will help to find out the processes which are not required. This will help to maximum efficiency.

Archive old categories and data: Activation of data archive plugin and setting up rules will help to you keep old data filtered out from active list views and searches. This data can be accessed from archived tables in case required. Studying the incident categories can hep us to find for which categories have never been reported in last few months. It can help us to take a decision to deactivate unused categories which will help to improve the efficiency.

Update Sets Decluttering: Update sets with state as ’in progress’ should be reviewed, if they are not aimed to be moved to production the state should be set to ignored and changes should be reverted to default.

Cloning Process: Cloning process should be adopted. A periodic cloning may be monthly or quarterly will help to bridge the gaps between production and sub-production instances.

Following the Ut-supra rules are not just a set of best practices. Implementing the above mentioned points help to improve the overall efficiency. This also enables a great user experience for those who visit instance just to log an incident.

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