Preserving ServiceNow Performance for Reporting and Analytics

Imagine that you are a ServiceNow platform owner at a company where reporting slows down the ServiceNow instance.

You have offered guidance to users on reporting best practices. Data from several years ago likely has less value for reporting purposes than data from the last few years. You could delete the old data – but, well, it does still have some value. You also asked users to limit how much data they query. But you have a growing volume of data, and restricting access to that wealth of data also limits your company’s insights.

ServiceNow support has helped you tune your instance and offered insight on more intricate queries. But even with that expert guidance, the reporting activity of your users still hits your ServiceNow instance with disruptive performance impacts.

Large Data Volumes? You Have ServiceNow Performance Issues

The performance of ServiceNow during reporting is a challenge that all ServiceNow customers with large data volumes face. PayPal faced this issue as well. Large queries there hit ServiceNow performance. So PayPal found a way to move this data outside ServiceNow to enable advanced reporting.

Transcript – Reporting and ServiceNow Performance

If somebody understands the ServiceNow platform, they have the push and the pull mechanism.

And in most of the cases, the pull is what the system uses, especially in APIs and anything else.

And that really slows down the general performance of the instance. And ServiceNow kept on telling us, “Hey, you need to get people off for doing reporting – off the platform and into something else because they are doing those crazy long queries that slows down everything else. What would happen if you just query a change table with millions of records?”

For looking for one change just for a report, it’s going to stop everything else.

It becomes very slow as you multiply these queries.

So performance was also another impact that we wanted to get ahead of. We didn’t want to have any impact on the main instance.

But on the other side, we also wanted people to have quick access to reporting and to data. And that’s where the sweet spot for Perspectium was eventually.

Unlocking ServiceNow Data for Faster Reporting

By extracting ServiceNow data and moving it to external storage, you can preserve the performance of ServiceNow.

PayPal is just one enterprise that solved this problem for their BI teams. For additional ideas about keeping ServiceNow performance running strong, see stories of additional ServiceNow customers.