How to Speed Up a ServiceNow Table Search: The Ultimate Guide

If you’re desperate for a guaranteed way to speed up a ServiceNow table search, you’re not alone.

In the fast-paced world of IT service management, efficiency is key, and slow table searches in ServiceNow can significantly impact productivity. 

Whether you’re a ServiceNow administrator, developer, or user, finding ways to optimize your platform’s search capabilities can improve the user experience and streamline operations. 

There are two primary strategies to speed up ServiceNow table searches: reducing the volume of data on the platform through off-platform archiving, and off-loading data-intensive tasks like reporting to third-party solutions using data replication. 

In this guide, we’ll explore how both strategies work and how implementing them can significantly enhance the speed and efficiency of your ServiceNow instance.

Table of contents

1. Why Table Search Performance Matters
2. How Archiving Can Speed Up Table Searches in ServiceNow
3. Off-Loading Data Intensive Tasks: Using Data Replication to Speed Up Table Search in ServiceNow
4. How Perspectium Helps Speed Up a ServiceNow Table Search and More

Why Table Search Performance Matters

ServiceNow is a powerful ITSM platform that stores vast amounts of data in tables across multiple modules. As your organization accumulates more data over time, the platform’s performance—especially in relation to search speed—can slow down. 

This is because ServiceNow must sift through all the records stored within tables to find the relevant data for your search queries. When these tables grow in size, the search process takes longer, leading to delays in retrieving crucial information.

Reducing the volume of data within the platform is a guaranteed way to speed up a ServiceNow table search. This can be done by archiving older or infrequently accessed data. But how you archive data—whether on-platform or off-platform—makes a big difference.

How Archiving Can Speed Up Table Searches in ServiceNow

Archiving is one of the most effective ways to reduce the data volume within your ServiceNow instance and therefore improve search performance. 

By moving older/in-active records from production tables to archive tables, you minimize the amount of data ServiceNow has to search through when executing queries. This results in faster search times, less strain on the platform, and a smoother overall user experience.

Platform performance can be improved further by archiving older/in-active records off-platform. 

On-Platform Archiving vs. Off-Platform Archiving: The Key Difference

While ServiceNow provides its own archiving capabilities, there are some inherent limitations with its approach. 

ServiceNow’s native archiving only moves data from your production tables to archive tables within the same instance. This means that while the data is technically archived, it is still stored on the same platform. 

As a result, both the production and archive tables exist on the platform, and ServiceNow must still process and store the data within the instance. This can cause a strain on system resources and can mean organizations inadvertently incur additional storage fees for exceeding contractual limits.

This is where off-platform archiving comes into play.

Off-Platform Archiving: The Superior Solution

Off-platform archiving involves moving older data to a third-party storage solution outside of the ServiceNow platform. This approach eliminates the need for ServiceNow to store archived records within its own instance, allowing the platform to operate with a leaner database. 

By using a third-party solution for archiving, your platform only contains the data that is actively in use, which drastically speeds up search queries and improves performance across the board.

Off-platform archiving offers several key benefits over ServiceNow’s native archiving:

1. Reduced Data Load: By archiving data off the platform, ServiceNow is no longer burdened with managing and storing large datasets. This frees up system resources and speeds up table search times.
2. Improved System Performance: With less data to search through, ServiceNow’s search functionality works more efficiently, delivering results faster and reducing lag or delays.
3. Scalability: As your ServiceNow instance grows, archiving data off the platform ensures that your system remains agile and scalable, without the need for constant performance tuning and optimization.
4. Cost-Effectiveness: Third-party archiving solutions often provide a more cost-effective way to store vast amounts of data over time, as they typically offer better storage options and lower long-term costs compared to the expenses associated with maintaining large volumes of data in ServiceNow.

How to Implement Off-Platform Archiving

To implement off-platform archiving and start speeding up your ServiceNow table searches, you need to work with a reliable third-party archiving solution. Here’s a general step-by-step process to get started:

1. Identify Archiving Requirements: Determine which data needs to be archived based on factors like usage frequency, relevance, and business requirements. Typically, older records or completed tasks can be archived.
2. Choose a Third-Party Solution: Research third-party archiving solutions that integrate seamlessly with ServiceNow. Look for solutions that offer robust features such as secure storage, easy data retrieval, and scalability.
3. Set Up the Archiving Process: Work with your IT team to configure and automate the archiving process, ensuring that older data is transferred off the platform and securely stored in the third-party solution.
4. Test and Monitor: After setting up the solution, run tests to ensure the process is working smoothly. Regularly monitor system performance to verify that table search speeds have improved.

Off-Loading Data Intensive Tasks: Using Data Replication to Speed Up Table Search in ServiceNow

In addition to archiving, another effective way to speed up ServiceNow table searches is to offload data-intensive tasks, such as reporting and analytics, to third-party solutions.

ServiceNow is a powerful platform, but as your organization grows and accumulates more data, the burden of running complex queries and generating reports can impact system performance.

By replicating data and offloading reporting tasks to a third-party solution, you can reduce the load on ServiceNow and optimize its search performance. Here’s how this strategy works:

• Data Replication: By replicating relevant data from ServiceNow to an external database or data warehouse, you can offload the processing of complex queries and reporting from the ServiceNow platform. This ensures that ServiceNow only handles essential, real-time data, leaving heavy data tasks to specialized systems.
• Off-Loading Reporting: Reporting and analytics can consume significant computing resources, especially when dealing with large volumes of data. By using third-party reporting tools or business intelligence platforms that are designed to handle large datasets efficiently, ServiceNow is freed from these resource-heavy tasks, ensuring that search performance is not compromised by slow reports or data processing.
• Reduced Latency in Search: By ensuring that data-intensive operations are conducted outside of ServiceNow, the platform can focus on delivering faster table searches and smoother user experiences. With less load from reporting and analytics tasks, ServiceNow can focus on its core functionality and handle table searches more efficiently.

Note: Avoid point-to-point integrations

Point-to-point integrations rely on introducing multiple integrations to connect ServiceNow to multiple solutions.

However, this can lead to an increased amount of queries made directly to ServiceNow as such integrations compete for platform resources and the REST API to retrieve data.

Instead, integrating ServiceNow with a data lake, warehouse or other external repository that is optimized for secure, enterprise-wide access and repeat queries, organizations can integrate ServiceNow without impacting the platform’s performance. 

How Perspectium Helps Speed Up a ServiceNow Table Search and More

When it comes to an organizations ability to speed up a ServiceNow table search, reducing the amount of data within the platform is key. Archiving old or unused data is the best way to do this, but ServiceNow’s own archiving capabilities fall short by simply moving data within the platform. 

Off-platform archiving with a third-party solution, however, offers a more effective and scalable approach, ensuring your ServiceNow instance remains fast, efficient, and agile as your organization grows.

Furthermore, by offloading data-intensive tasks such as reporting and analytics to third-party solutions and utilizing data replication, you can further enhance performance. 

With Perspectium, organizations can embrace both off-platform archiving and data off-loading strategies to not only improve search performance, but also future-proof ServiceNow for long-term success.

Perspectium provides natively installed ServiceNow applications for replicating ServiceNow data externally.

Data Archive for ServiceNow allows users to store archived data within external repositories that they control benefiting the costs associated with data storage, accessibility, adherence to compliance and ServiceNow performance.

DataSync allows ServiceNow users to replicate massive volumes of ServiceNow data externally in-real time, both dynamically and in-bulk. This allows organizations to make use of ServiceNow data within third-party applications of their choice including data repositories and solutions for reporting, analyzing and leveraging data in AI.

If you want to ensure optimal performance for your ServiceNow instance, start implementing off-platform archiving and data replication today with Perspectium, and experience faster table searches and smoother operations.