Top 6 Wish List Features for ServiceNow Administrators

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We can’t help but always want more! Here are my personal thoughts on 6 features that would round out the product and make ServiceNow’s administrator’s day to day life so much easier.

  1. Restart a node

    I couldn’t count the number of times when some rogue Performance Analytic job got hung, and an entire node got hung. You have to reach out to HI, have them verify, and then they have to initiate the bounce. It’s 2021, and we don’t have the option to turn it off and back on in ServiceNow.

  2. Trace a transaction, log, error, etc

    Something that an absolute pain in ServiceNow is figuring out something about a server side transaction, a log or anything, and trying to trace it down to what might be the root cause. You have to have multiple tabs open, recording timestamps, session ids, user ids, etc., to find anything at all. I would kill for some call stack type of technology, or better debugging tools.

  3. Enhanced Self Monitoring

    ServiceNow actually has a self monitoring capability for Event Management, so it can manage itself. It would be great to take the step even further and build in self monitoring for nodes, database, event queue, email queue, or literally anything else besides just Event Management and MID servers resource alerts. I know some things are in the pipeline, but I just wish this formally gets expanded upon. So much potential.

  4. AI DB Index Enhancer

    ServiceNow has some little tools to suggest database indexes, but wouldn’t it be great if it was smarter? Or you could set it up with some rules to automatically make suggested index tweaks on the fly? Some automation and algorithm to use indexes better could make a mediocre instance an amazing instance.

  5. Workspace with quick actions dashboard for SysAdmins

    Workspaces are beginning to be all the rage, and they are great for so many different user personas. One such user persona is a ServiceNow admin. It would be awesome if there was a workspace that delivered to them their days work right in a single interface with powerful buttons and actions to manage that world. Simplify so many clicks. I know there are some good community dashboards and tools out there for sysadmins, so I hope this is just a matter of time!

  6. Release Automation

    ServiceNow has been iterating on CI/CD for a number of releases now, but we still don’t have any automated capabilities for update sets, the backbone of ServiceNow instances for over a decade. I also hope they build some interfaces and flows for customers that want to use those CI/CD spoke actions, so they can get going fast.