How to Improve ServiceNow Data Availability

Improving ServiceNow data availability helps organizations make more productive use of ServiceNow data in analysis, reporting and more. 

The most effective way to improve ServiceNow data availability, is to integrate ServiceNow with an external database. 

Without integrating the platform, data within ServiceNow is siloed, and difficult to distribute among the systems and people that can utilize it. 

What is Data Availability?

Data availability describes the accessibility of ready-to-use data. As such, improving the availability of data requires a combination of systems and processes that ensure data is stored, accessible and transformed into a format that the organization can readily use.

Continuity is also a tenant of data availability, with systems and processes supporting backup and disaster recovery integral to ensuring data is available amidst disruption. 

Good data availability ensures seamless operations with uninterrupted access to data. Data that is not readily available in the proper format can impede operations such as service delivery, and lead to disruptions in internal processes, resulting in the loss of time and revenue. 

How ServiceNow-to-database Integrations Improve ServiceNow Data Availability

With a ServiceNow-to-database integration, organizations can store and access ServiceNow data in a more suitable environment.

Without integrating ServiceNow, employees are often forced into ill-advised workarounds – such as login credential sharing – to access and use ServiceNow data. Organizations also suffer in terms of productivity, as manual methods of extracting and replicating data need to be employed to get data to where it needs to be. 

ServiceNow-to-database integrations allow organizations to easily manage ServiceNow data from multiple departments with distinct requirements, while reserving access to sensitive data to approved stakeholders only. 

This encourages better and more secure data democratization, allowing employees controlled, self-service access to the database to support them in functions such as analysis, reporting AI, ML, data lake building, and data warehousing.

Improve ServiceNow Data Availability with Dynamic, Real-time Data Delivery

With the right method of integration, organizations can even benefit from dynamic, real-time data delivery, ensuring data replicated from ServiceNow reflects an up-to-date view of the organization. 

With dynamic, real-time data delivery, organizations can obtain timely and accurate reflections of business operations through reports and analysis by ensuring that data reaches the right recipients at the right time and in the right format. This fosters informed decision-making by delivering an up-to-date view of organizational metrics.

The biggest advantage of integrating ServiceNow with best-in-class data repositories is that these are well-supported by dedicated business solutions that use and/or manipulate data. Thus, by replicating ServiceNow data to an external database, users can easily access it for use cases such as BI, AL, ML, and reporting.

Maintain Data Availability with Backup and Disaster Recovery

As well as integrating ServiceNow with external databases, organizations should also implement sufficient processes and systems for managing and creating backups. 

While ServiceNow provide some functionality for backup and disaster recovery, users have very little control over the process. Limitations to ServiceNow’s default backup capabilities include:

• No control over when backups are created
• No control over how long backups are retained
• No control over what is included in a backup
• No control over what is restored from a backup 

Fortunately, ServiceNow’s backup functionality can be upgraded with a purpose-built, ServiceNow-native backup and restore solution.

With greater control over the backup process, organizations are better equipped to maintain high levels of data availability throughout disruptive events such as data loss and corruption.  

Use Cases for Improving the Availability of ServiceNow Data

Improving the availability of ServiceNow data allows organizations to make better use of ServiceNow data in various use cases, including:

• Replicating ServiceNow data in third-party solutions for improved reporting, analysis and more

Integrating ServiceNow with an external database allows organizations to easily feed data into third-party solutions. While ServiceNow has some support for analysis and reporting, the features are limited and many organizations prefer to utilize purpose-built solutions for more informed analysis, reports and insight. 

This is a huge benefit to the many organizations that have already invested in purpose built reporting, analysis and business intelligence solutions such as Tableau and Power BI. Data teams and the various departments that utilize data can work with ServiceNow data within the purpose-built tools with which they have expertise.

Organizations benefit from a wider range of data visualization options; more complex reporting scenarios; and a higher-throughput of data into solutions that benefit from high-quality, regular data input such as AI and ML tools.

• Dashboards, and combining ServiceNow data with other sources

Despite its popularity, the ServiceNow platform is a data silo that can limit the insight the platform can provide.

ServiceNow-to-database integrations facilitate more contextualized analysis, reporting and intelligence by allowing for ServiceNow data to be combined with other sources. 

For example, organizations are better placed to make informed decisions on data that originates in disparate systems, such as the impact time-to-resolution has on customer retention. 

Organizations can also include ServiceNow data in enterprise dashboards to enhance the visualization and interpretation of key metrics. It streamlines reporting, empowering different teams to leverage diverse tools and platforms for effective collaboration and strategic planning. 

With ServiceNow data made available in an external repository, it can be more easily fed into purpose-built solutions for analysis, reporting and more.

• Self-service access through data democratization

Data democratization empowers individuals with self-service access to vital data for everyday business operations. 

For organizations using ServiceNow, a robust data democratization strategy ensures the widespread availability of ServiceNow data for stakeholders, supported by automated integrations that securely transfer the right data across systems. 

This improves collaboration and minimizes reliance on manual processes, reducing the risk of security breaches, while maintaining data quality.

Data democratization optimizes data value and is highly beneficial for projects and teams engaging in extensive data consumption, spanning areas like AI, BI, ML, reporting and analysis, and predictive analytics. 

Approved users can easily access necessary data and extract real-time insights, unlocking its true value. By promoting real-time analysis and identifying emerging trends and opportunities, data democratization provides a competitive edge in the market and helps deliver improved customer experiences.

• Improved ServiceNow performance

Replicating ServiceNow data to an external database can vastly improve the performance of ServiceNow. The more data within the ServiceNow platform, the more system resources are required to query the data and return results. 

This directly impacts functions including reporting, dashboards and more. With a lot of data in ServiceNow, such functions are slowed, and can even become unresponsive, causing significant delays to data delivery. 

However, there is also a knock on effect to primary ServiceNow functions, that can become unresponsive when the platform is querying the database. 

Many organizations that experience this dynamic are forced into workarounds such as only allowing tasks such as generating reports outside of operational hours.

Not only does this limit the availability of data and its timely delivery, but it also risks outright failure – such as system time outs – meaning the data, insights, etc., are still not ready for use when operational hours resume. 

By replicating ServiceNow data within an external database, organizations can instead use purpose-built solutions to create reports, dashboards, etc., allowing ServiceNow to operate more efficiently. They also avoid the need for workarounds such as generating reports outside of operational hours.

• Real-time data

Modern organizations are driven by real-time insights and today, IT leaders are consciously switching to dynamic dashboards from static reports for more comprehensive and up-to-date insight. 

By integrating ServiceNow data with external databases, it can be fed in real-time into third-party dynamic dashboards, providing optimal insights that reflect an up-to-date view of the whole organization. 

After all, the goal is to provide users with the right data at the right time in formats conducive to informed decision-making. Such an integration improves the organization’s agility and responsiveness, equipping decision-makers with a real-time data view. 

Benefits of High Data Availability

By integrating ServiceNow with external tools/solutions, organizations can make business-critical data available and accessible to a wider audience rather than limiting access to a few select individuals or teams. 

• Data-driven decision-making – When ServiceNow data is readily accessible to key decision-makers, they can make more informed decisions. They can access real-time data and insights to better understand the business’s current state and identify the most pressing areas for improvement.
• Enhance collaboration – Opening up access to ServiceNow data via an external database fosters collaboration and communication across teams within the organization. This accessibility allows different teams and professionals to collaborate on shared projects, promoting a unified approach and accelerating solutions to real-world challenges.
• Boost productivity – More accessible ServiceNow data inevitably enhances productivity by enabling stakeholders to retrieve and analyze necessary information for their specific needs. This streamlined approach reduces the time spent on data collection, allowing more focus on value-added activities.
• Enhance accountability – Increased transparency and visibility into organizational data provide valuable insights for identifying areas of improvement. This improved visibility empowers managers and employees to track their progress, fostering a culture of accountability as organizational data becomes more visible.
• Elevate employee and customer experiences – Data accessibility eliminates redundant manual processes and aligns data across systems, creating a seamless collaborative experience for employees. Professionals can enrich their expertise, resulting in better outcomes. Additionally, the immediate availability of data allows teams to promptly respond to customer requests and incidents, significantly reducing the time-to-resolution for open cases.
• Ensure data accuracy – High data availability promotes self-service access and encourages accurate reporting. Integrations supporting self-service reporting reduce reliance on manual data entry and analysis, ensuring the reliability and consistency of data.

Improving the Availability of ServiceNow Data, with Perspectium

Perspectium provides ServiceNow-native solutions and a managed service for integrating and replicating massive amounts of ServiceNow data, without impacting performance.

• See also: Perspectium Named a Top 10 ServiceNow Solution

As a managed service, Perspectium implements and maintains the solution, ensuring its customers’ internal resources can be used efficiently, focussing on value-adding initiatives.

Created by ServiceNow’s founding developer, David Loo, Perspectium was developed to overcome common hurdles with improving the availability of ServiceNow data. As such, Perspectium applications are designed for high-throughput and on-time data delivery.

As a native solution, Perspectium’s tools are embedded within the ServiceNow UI, and do not require web services or API calls that consume ServiceNow’s operational bandwidth.

This means users have an easy-to-use, no code solution for replicating and integrating ServiceNow that does not impede the platform’s performance. 

Perspectium’s DataSync solution extracts and replicates data to external repositories via push technology and a message broker system (MBS). This approach facilitates massive throughput and frictionless integration between ServiceNow and data-intensive applications for performance reporting, analytics, AI, BI, ML, etc. 

Speaking to the quality of Perspectium’s solution and services, ServiceNow uses Perspectium internally. 

Rather than working with internally developed solutions such as the IntegrationHub, ServiceNow relies on Perspectium to transfer data from numerous production instances to external databases that teams around the organization can access.

To learn more about how Perspectium ensures high data availability and accessibility, talk to our experts today!