Service now Monitoring - How do you do it?

Greetings THWACK. Question to see how others are monitoring your instance of Service Now.

I was going to setup a HTTPS monitor in SAM to check to see if our instance of Service Now was up which is simple and easy to do. I was just wondering if anyone out in THWACK world has done anything different. If not no big deal and I will setup the HTTPS monitor to check for words on the web page.

Thanks!

Dave

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Accepted answers

bogdan.stan

If you have service now you should consider doing the Service now integration. Even if you do not use alerts with integration this is the best way to tell if the Service now is actually working.

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All comments

bogdan.stan

If you have service now you should consider doing the Service now integration. Even if you do not use alerts with integration this is the best way to tell if the Service now is actually working.

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martian_monster

Oh nice! I was trying to setup an HTTPS monitor but kept running into some odd issues. The integration module makes sense - if SW can't talk to SN then there must be an issue. Thanks!

martian_monster

And I just received the 'well that is going to be hard to do' from our SN team.. so back to the HTTPS monitor. Thanks for pointing this out and hopefully we can setup our integration sooner than later. - Dave

serena

https://thwack.solarwinds.com/people/martian%20monster wrote:
And I just received the 'well that is going to be hard to do' from our SN team.. so back to the HTTPS monitor. Thanks for pointing this out and hopefully we can setup our integration sooner than later. - Dave

I'm very curious, why is that hard to do? All they have to do is provide access for you to fill out

martian_monster

Yeah I mentioned that we just needed to turn on the connection and not setup the monitoring or any of the other Service Now ticket items. I also watched the video and it was really easy to setup. We just launched this on Monday so they might be a bit overwhelmed.

jm_sysadmin

Maybe 6 years ago we were having some service now performance issues. I added our instance URL as an external node, and the Https response code check. No problems were visible, but people had issues. I don't think our version had REST access yet, so they gave me SOAP access. I used the powershell monitor to query the ping time (as a baseline for connectivity so I could have it in my old school graph since I didn't have the new fancy graph Orion has now). Then I grab 250 records from the incident table and the CMDB table for server CI's. This give me two data-points on how well the retrieval of information in the database is working. Much like Orion, in service now when you display data sometimes its the thing you are using to pull data with that needs work, and with service now, the admins have a lot of impact on the code that runs on the page. If the connectivity doesn't change, but he time it takes to get the records does, its likely and issue that serive now needs to look at from our instance. If the queries are quick but the pages slow, our admins need to look at the code on those pages to see what's taking so long. We set thresholds once stuff was normal again so that we gets alerts on when load times creep up, and I do see changes after updates, so the threshold get tweaked from time to time. Also later I added a NetPath map, which I love since it shows what is and isn't good about stuff between us and them.

Anyway, here's code from that monitor, your mileage may vary and you may want to move to REST queries. I am trying to put an post together with this and some of my other powershell monitors, but just haven't finished it yet.

$Avg = 0

$Server = "<yourinstance>.service-now.com"

$PingServer = test-Connection -count 10 $Server

$Avg = ($PingServer | measure-Object ResponseTime -average)

$Calc = [System.Math]::Round($Avg.average)

$Min = ($PingServer | measure-Object ResponseTime -Min).Minimum

$Max = ($PingServer | measure-Object ResponseTime -Max).maximum

Write-host "Message.MinPing: Minimum ping to $server"

Write-host "Statistic.MinPing: $Min"

Write-Host "Message.MaxPing: Max ping to $server"

Write-Host "Statistic.MaxPing: $Max"

Write-Host "Message.AvePing: Average ping to $server"

Write-Host "Statistic.AvePing: $Calc"

$cred = Get-Credential '${CREDENTIAL}'

$ServiceNowINC = New-WebServiceProxy -uri'https://'+$server+'/incident.do?WSDL' -Credential $cred

$INCtype = $ServiceNowINC.GetType().Namespace

$getRecords = New-Object ($INCtype + '.getRecords')

$INCtime = Measure-Command { $INC = $ServiceNowINC.getRecords($getRecords) }

Write-host "Message.Incident: Time in MS to list 250 Incidents"

$RndINC = [math]::Round($INCtime.TotalMilliseconds, 0)

Write-host "Statistic.Incident: $RndINC"

$ServiceNowCI = New-WebServiceProxy -uri 'https://'+$server+'/cmdb_ci_server.do?WSDL' -Credential $cred

$CItype = $ServiceNowCI.GetType().Namespace

$getRecords = New-Object ($CItype + '.getRecords')

$CItime = Measure-Command { $CI = $ServiceNowCI.getRecords($getRecords) }

Write-host "Message.CIs: Time in MS to list 250 Server CIs"

$RndCIs = [math]::Round($CItime.TotalMilliseconds, 0)

Return "Statistic.CIs: $RndCIs"

Exit 0;

martian_monster

WOW! Thank you. I passed this over the the Service Now team for additional monitoring options.

jm_sysadmin

If they want to talk about this ping me directly. It not that sophisticated but it can be useful and there are lots of ideas that can work via REST. Pre-integration I was making incidents via powershell too. If you use other modules you may want to send data other spots too (events?) and I also help populate the CMDB via a data transform since we don't have disocovery with Service Now. My devs are back to SQL queries, but they have in the past used SWQL via the api and SQL in the past

martian_monster

Question - can I only have one instance of Service Now connected to Solarwinds? We setup integrations and it looks like they want me to connect our prod version of Solarwinds to DEV and TEST in ServiceNow. I do not think we can but I want to ask. Thanks.

jan.rachwalik

Not sure if that helps here, but there is API Poller for ServiceNow:
https://thwack.solarwinds.com/content-exchange/server-application-monitor/m/api-pollers/2118

This template collects ServiceNow incidents statistics.