Instance Observer (IO) is an observability and performance monitoring tool that empowers you to keep track of your instance health and performance in near real-time, while also providing historical insights.

Overview of Instance Observer

IO helps Instance Administrators, Platform Owners, and DevOps teams accelerate value and drive their desired business outcomes by increasing visibility into instance performance, helping customers push innovation with speed and confidence.

Features and Benefits

Key Features
  • 24/7 Monitoring: Instance performance monitoring provides awareness of issues within an instance before end users  are impacted.
  • 24/7 Alerting: Set up custom alerts to notify you when specific thresholds are crossed, so you can take action before an issue becomes critical.
  • Multi-instance Availability: Proactively visualize performance  telemetry across instances. Empowering  organizations to identify trends before  end users are impacted.
  • Triage: Actionable point-in-time  instance metadata providing additional  context to instance performance and accelerating troubleshooting.
  • Off Instance Application: Access to instance performance  telemetry off instance. When an  issue does arise, organizations can  access actionable data independent of  instance availability.
  • Reporting: Visualize instance performance  telemetry over time and quickly generate reports to share with your business stakeholders, making  organizations faster, smarter, and better in their  instance performance management.
  • Analytics: Compare metrics over time to see how performance is trending in general or to assess the before and after impacts of certain changes.
Key Benefits
  • 24/7 availability: Instance Observer is an off-instance, cloud-based application allowing customers to visualize instance telemetry across instance(s) in a single application.
  • Improve Instance performance: By monitoring instance performance metrics in real time, you can quickly identify and resolve issues that might be causing poor performance impacting end users.
  • Increase uptime: Proactive monitoring through Instance Observer alerting you can be notified of potential issues before they cause downtime, allowing you to act before it affects your users.
  • Improve troubleshooting: When issues do arise, have actionable point-in-time metadata accelerating root cause analysis and time to relief.
  • Remove distractions: With near real-time data at your fingertips, you and your team can spend less time trying to find the information you need and more time driving your desired business outcomes
Note: Instance Observer is not available with ServiceNow® mobile, however, may be accessed with a browser on your mobile device.

Instance Observer features

Table 1. Feature and description
FeatureDescription
Home Provides a snapshot of the overall health of your instance.
Performance Overviews Instance Health and Performance Metrics, and enables drill down into specific data sets with recommended troubleshooting.
Availability View live Instance Availability status tied to ServiceNow  monitoring— Up/Down Status
Key Alerts Activation and Notifications Flexibility to set alerts with thresholds specific to your business needs, and configure who on your team receives notifications and the method.
Analytics View comparisons for performance of key metrics over time.
Triage Point-in-time instance snapshot providing metadata to troubleshoot live issues
Reports Quickly generate reports to download and share with your team business stakeholders.​
Help Get assistance with Instance Observer tools, terminology review, how-to videos, and relevant documents.

Support matrix per Impact package

Some Instance Observer reporting features vary between the Impact package that you are subscribed to. Reference the support matrix chart or contact your account team for more information.

  • ✓ = Supported
  • X = Not supported
Table 2. Feature and supported Impact package
FeatureGuidedAdvancedTotal
Instance availability (Up/Down status)

See Availability for details.

 ✓ ✓ ✓
Performance Visualization Charts (KPIs)

See Performance for more details.

 ✓ ✓ ✓
Reporting

See Reports for details.

 Selective Full Full
Alerts

See Key Alerts Activation and Notifications for details.

 X ✓ ✓
Analytics

See Analytics for details.

 X X ✓
Anomalies Detection X X ✓
Data retention 45 days 6 months 6 months
Note: For more information on subscription support, see Impact packages.

Serviceability Limitations

Note: Instance Observer is available for customers in Commercial and Government Community Cloud (GCC) environments. IO is not currently available in other regulated or on-premise environments.