Health Scan finally going Public with Impact Health!?

For more than a decade, ServiceNow has sold a product called Health Scan, which allows you to check your instance against best practices. This product has always been proprietary, hidden, and only requestable on demand. Due to this, there have been many (myself included), invested in writing our own instance scan checks, or using 3rd Party applications that maintain the rule libraries themselves.

That all changes with the recent release last month, of Impact Health (store link) which includes 62 checks straight from ServiceNow. ServiceNow also intends (forward looking statements disclaimer) to get it closer to feature parity with Health Scan by one of the next feature releases.

Right now, of the 62 checks, they are all table and column level checks. The table level checks (24 of them) are transparent, but the column level checks/linter checks are protected (and we cannot see them). Given that trend it is highly likely that the remaining scripted checks will all be protected as well.

In Dec 2022 I developed 37 different health scan checks, to push for more open source checks to be available. Of those checks I developed, 5 of them made it into this release. Those checks are:

• Console.log in Client Scripts (day 8) comparable to HSD0001312 & HSD0001312

• JDBC Data Sources with "Use last run datetime" option unchecked (day 16) comparable to HSD0001554

• Synchronous Business Rules making SOAP or REST calls (day 23) comparable to HSD0001578 - mine is significantly better than theirs though

• Business Rules without function (bonus) comparable to HSD0003625

Closing Thoughts

I think this is a monumental shift though in the way ServiceNow is doing business, and I think some of the transparency is much appreciated, and will drive cleaner ServiceNow instances across the world. However, I’m annoyed that a majority of the code is hidden, and I really hope for more open source and transparency in best practices.

10 UI Pages That Need to Be Talked About

There are a number of tiny little pages in ServiceNow, for users, developers, and administrators alike that could be made use of. Here is my top 10!

1. cancel_my_transaction.do
   This is one that anyone can make use of, to cancel their current running transaction before it times out. Accidently run a crazy report, load this page and it will cancel it.

2. loading_transactions.do
   This one isn’t so hidden, you can get to it via System Diagnostics > Active Transactions (All Nodes). This one is for admins to see all the current running jobs, and ability to kill them.

3. connection_test.do
   Have someone complain about ServiceNow being slow? Have them run this little page, and see if it’s really their connection that is slow instead!

4. cache.do
   This page really ought to be hidden away better… but if you ever need to flush your ServiceNow instance cache, this is the way.

5. cache_inspect.do
   There are some “hidden” ServiceNow elements that are only visible in the instance cache. Here is how you can find them!

6. stats.do, threads.do and replication.do
   I think most people know about these pages, but these give you a wealth of information like current node, running processes, memory, transaction performance, etc. For instances with Read Replica databases, replication.do is helping to track that as well.

7. xmlstats.do
   This is basically a beefed up version of stats.do, to provide the raw data. This page has support for specifying particular ‘includes” so you can view a smaller subset.

8. channel.do?sysparm_channel=logtail
   If you ever want to see the system tomcat logs for the instance in realtime, in your browser, this is fun to watch. Very mind opening how fast and how many things happen in the instance at once.

9. side_door.do
   This is the basic mechanism to use to bypass single sign on in case of a break-glass situation to login to ServiceNow.

10. $m.do
    A little bit of a blast to the past, but you can pull up the old mobile app interface right in your browser!

Honorary mentions: email_diagnostics.do, mid_tools_form.do, governor.do, and some others I can’t remember…

Top 6 Wish List Features for ServiceNow Administrators

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.