recording so we want to say thank you to everyone for taking the time wherever you are in the world we appreciate you volunteering giving us your time to learn more about the instance troubleshooter application and the latest version of version 3.0 that we've recently released it's part of our larger uh goal to always provide um you know the latest tools and and um well approaches for customers to be able to keep their instances healthy and to be as autonomous as possible uh by all means we still love to talk to our customers of course but there are times where you want to self-diagnose and and do this on your own and this is uh one of the tools that we've uh published and and continue to uh build out uh for that particular purpose uh today we have some of our uh the lead contributors and the product managers of uh here uh so i'll let both of them introduce themselves but we have magesh and we also have caesar and they will be our presenters today so my name is mike hamblin i'm your host by all means ping me with questions i'm gonna step back and allow uh magesh and caesar to more formally uh introduce themselves and then take the presentation away so magesh would you like to start things off yeah thank you mike thanks everyone for joining good morning good afternoon and good evening from folks learning uh from across the globe um thanks uh thanks mike for uh coordinating this event as well as uh for the introduction uh my name is magesh narayanan i'm a product manager on the cloud apps team which is part of the global cloud services organization here in uh servicenow i'm also joined by caesar uh i'll let him introduce uh himself and then i'll um you know follow through with the presentation cesar yes hello everyone um i'm cesar sandoval i've been with uh servicenow support for more than 10 years i started as a tse um that cse means uh front lines these are the fine folks that handle all of the cases and and as of recently um i got i started a role as a tsa technical support architect which means taking a higher level view of cases so rather than just looking at one by one i look at volume and patterns and the goal of looking patterns and analyzing case data is to reduce time to relief for cases and to also reduce case volume all right thanks thanks caesar uh can everyone see my uh screen uh the slide might yes we can okay so let's get going uh so what we'd like to do today is obviously talk about this uh app called the instance troubleshooter some of you might already be familiar with it some of you might be new to it um so basically what we'd like to do is just walk through a few slides uh you know about the about the app and what what it is and what you can use it for and then after that we'll have a demo uh of how to use it and walk through some of the functionalities of the of the app and then of course we'll we'll take a q a after that and uh feel free to post your questions like mike said in into the into the zoom q a um you know portion of it but we'll also take a q a at the end as well okay so what is instance double shooter uh instance troubleshooter is basically a self-service tool to diagnose and resolve issues within your instance uh it is it is used by the it is meant for the servicenow admin um you basically just install uh this free store app uh from the servicenow store uh onto your instance and then you uh run it uh it basically scans your instance for known issues uh that we have worked with our customer support team like cesar mentioned subject matter experts and uh some key members of the technical support organization where they're familiar with the real world issues that customers are facing within their instance so we have built all these things as checks uh within the app so customers themselves can fix them uh without having to call uh support so what this results in is a fast resolution for customers as well as a reduction of cases for our uh technical support organization so what what is the app uh basically you know we'll go through uh some of this in the demo but basically it has a simple uh ui with a card layout of uh servicenow products and services that we support uh it is built it's like a service portal uh ui uh and then you can invoke the the tool itself by just uh a single click like scanning uh your instance for a particular um category uh like let's say mid server or email or authentication we support a bunch of categories and uh products and services that are part of the servicenow platform uh and then it you know just goes through the scan a quick progress bar of the of the diagnosis it doesn't take more than a couple of minutes for the for the scan to complete um and then the findings are shown in your traditional servicenow native uh list view and uh related lists uh view of all the findings and each finding is basically an issue a potential issue that could manifest and cause issues within your instance uh and each issue is uh that comes with a clear description of what it is as well as a link to the documentation and what to do to fix it to which which property to change or what what to do uh and we also have um a pa dashboard that is part of the app um that shows some metrics about your usage so you can kind of track how you're doing with respect to the findings in the under scans system requirements for this app uh it's it's pretty much uh you know uh it's available for you know the kind of in the releases through back room and san diego uh it's based off of the instant scan plugin which is available out of the box and then it also uses the uh again the default uh performance analytics uh capability as well which is also available out of the box so you don't really need any special licensing requirements or uh you know purchase order and things like that uh it's it's pretty uh pretty straightforward and it's it's free it's free app on the store you know you ask you know what what is in it for the for the customer what is in it for you why do you why do you have to care about this tool what uh how is it going to be useful for you basically uh like mike pointed out you know we really want uh customers to derive the maximum value out of the service servicenow instance and for that you need a healthy instance you need the instance to be working uh optimally uh as intended by the you know the servicenow product teams as well as intended by uh yourself for your customization your business scenarios so for that uh you know if there are issues and as we know you know that a lot of customizations it's a complex uh you know uh platform so you want to uh be able to resolve find and resolve issues faster um so and we want to empower uh customers to do that without having to always rely on our technical support team um so this self-service tool was developed as a collaboration with uh customer support and all the checks in the in the in the app are basically developed by the technical support engineers uh as they have seen issues uh reported by customers and when customers themselves can uh self-serve uh by uh using this tool it provides relief to their issues faster without having to you know log a case and have that triage have that assigned to somebody in servicenow and them resolving it and it takes time and if it especially is a is a let's say it's not a p1 it is going to take time to resolve obviously because p1 issues take precedence over low priority issues but these lower priority issues obviously could manifest into bigger issues down the road and then the other thing is like you know by periodically running this tool and you know fixing issues you're going to have a healthy instance what are some of the features of the uh of the app and again we'll we'll show these things in the in the in the demo um we have support for about 19 products and services uh and what what they are is uh when i say products and services it's basically a logical grouping of the functionality of the servicenow product which is let's say authentication email mid server core platform ux service portal and so on and um so any issue with any uh configuration issue with respect to these products and services the app uh you know scans for the for the for those known issue commonly occurring easy to fix issues uh that you yourself can say oh you know what oh i didn't realize that this property was set to true or false so let me change it uh right so you might have forgotten something and we'll go over the demo um some of these in the demo the other thing is like you want to uh let's say uh uh you want to scan the instance periodically uh by you know like a weekly or daily or bi-weekly you can do that by using our feature to schedule a scan uh so that's what the scheduling integration is and then the other is as you scan and as you find issues you might want to assign it to various parts of your organization like if it's an email issue maybe it goes to an ldap admin a group or if it's a change management issue maybe it goes to the change management group uh you know you might have different uh people or different teams working on different parts of the servicenow implementation so uh you might want to create tasks when there are these findings so uh so that it integrates into your business uh you know business process uh that's what the task integration is then we have uh granular troubleshooting uh granular troubleshooting is instead of scanning the whole instance you can also scan a particular record or a table um and then you know findings and resolution we already talked about and then the dashboard and we also have uh ability for you to provide direct feedback to us from the app itself uh there are two ways you do that one is uh you know for the overall tool you can click on hey if you have an idea uh if you have an idea for uh for the tool how to improve it or a new check uh you can click on uh submitting an idea and it takes you to the servicenow idea portal and you can provide feedback the other uh way you can provide feedback is uh for a particular check if it was actually useful or not uh from within the finding itself you can click on give feedback and provide us and that'll reach us and we can um you know evaluate that what are some of the use cases that we've seen customers use for this for and what we think that uh you know you can use it uh as well uh one is uh like i said you know by having a periodic instance overall health check uh you are gonna maintain a healthy instance by finding and fixing those issues then the other uh scenario is uh your uh team your team of developers are working on let's say a scoped app or other some other enhancements feature development on your development instance uh you can uh you know prevent these issues from occurring in your prod instance by actually integrating this as part of your regular sdlc process so that you can run these scans as part of your development checkings we've we've seen customers use i use it in this capacity as well the other thing is let's say you're running into an issue uh and you want to see if uh instance troubleshooter uh has a check for that particular issue let's say you're having some issues with email uh you can run the tool to see if it finds it uh if it doesn't then you can log a longer case like how you would have already done and uh if it found it you can always uh fix it as well um and uh that's that's one of the scenarios that uh that you can use it to um then the other thing is uh you know let's say you really want to run it to maintain operational health of your instance for critical checks security checks performance checks and you can maybe do that as well so that's kind of some of the use cases that you can use this app for and currently we are uh we're in version three we just released it a month ago uh into the store uh we had version two last year uh and summer and uh b1 was launched in february of last year uh what we have added in in version three is we've added support for uh six additional products and services i think now we have about 19 total um and we also added 32 additional checks and then we also made some ux enhancements uh to the tool based on customer feedback i will uh now go to uh you know the the demo and then come back with the questions and as you get that set up i just want to remind that any uh for everyone actually attending is that you know there are different ways to get in touch with us you can post your questions via the chat or the question and answer section and we'd be happy to address those at the end too so just as a reminder but um go ahead yep thank you thank you mike thanks for that yes uh can everyone see my screen the browser window yes we can okay so this is a this is one of our demo instances uh in which we've installed the latest version of the tool uh you can invoke the tool uh by from the left nav uh type in instance troubleshooter and i've actually uh and you you'll see all the these are all things that i've favorited but basically you have a few menu items that we'll go over in this demo so instance troubleshooter is the the name of the um left nav app uh let's click on getting started this is kind of like the home page of the app where this is where you start using it and you can see that these are all the various uh suites we call them suites or product categories for which we have checks in the app um and um each one of them you can click on troubleshoot and then that will invoke the scan for the for the instance uh for that uh uh category so let's say uh for we're gonna run core platform for this demo it says hey and you want to run it and then say yes basically what happens is uh it it basically scans the instance for a number of checks that are incorporated for this category and then it comes back with finding let's say you click go to result there are other ways to get to the results we'll get to that in a second now you can see that there are this many findings um and the checks that were run or these are all the checks uh that were run uh for this uh product uh suite and let's look at one of them uh for the for this demo purpose right if you look at this uh it basically says that you know you have debug turned on basically what what's going to happen is a bunch of information is going to be logged the database and uh if you don't watch this this is going to bloat or increase the size of the database and can cause disk size issues and that will make your instance uh you know run into performance issues or even go down so what we want is uh to fix this by turning debug off maybe uh the scenario was that you you were investigating an issue and you uh had turned debug on and now forgot to turn it off so you know this is a check that says that hey go turn it off so let us fix that you can see the debuggers turned uh is set to true so i'm going to update it to false and then we'll do a um we'll do a scan to uh to show that uh that was fixed so now let's get back to some of the other capabilities uh so let's say from here um you know you can also um there are a few other uh capabilities of the app from here as you click on this one uh this this vertical um dots so one is uh you know for this particular suite what are all the scan checks right so you want to let's say you want to first preview what are all the checks that are done for this you can then see any you can click on each one of them and that will open up what the like for example this one it's going to show okay hey inbound email is disabled that means that the instance is not going to be able to receive an email and same thing with outbound as well so so like for example each one of those checks are looking for a particular issue uh that you can uh uh that's all going to be included for for the uh for this particular suite now that that's what that that uh this one clicking on this one does the next one is uh as a ability to schedule uh ability to schedule his uh what i mentioned earlier which is um you know you want to schedule this uh uh the scan um you know so let's let's go through that right so it first asks like okay hey do you want to do it a full instance or with scoped app or an update set uh let's say we do it for the full instance and here we can say so we can do say hey not a daily or weekly monthly rate uh or custom so let's do once and let us do it two minutes from now so so basically what we've done is uh we've done we've scheduled the the email scan or the other scan for uh scanning the instance for the email suite uh in two minutes from now and and we'll give it a couple of minutes when we look at other things the other thing is um we also have this thing called scan task config this is what i was mentioning earlier uh in terms of uh you know being able to create a configuration where whenever a particular set of issues are found let's say for this uh suite um you know you want to create a task and have it assigned to a particular group so let's do that here so let's say for priority one and priority two we're gonna do that say ldap admins market of active and submit so what this is going to do is whenever this can this uh there is a finding of priority one and two for the speed uh a task is going to get created for delta apartments so when you come in here so what i was saying earlier which is you you will actually see that a task was opened uh so let's give it a minute and then we'll see that here so um and and if there are any tasks that are opened for the suite you can actually also see that here and then the target scan is the one that i was mentioning earlier but you can actually choose to run it on a particular uh property itself so the other menu item here is the is what i mentioned earlier which is uh the um [Music] uh you know the results so if you want to actually go see all your results so let's see so this was the one that that was just run the one that we scheduled uh so let's click on that and you can see that you know these were all run uh and you can also uh see there are issues here outbound email is disabled which means that the instance cannot send email so obviously this is a as an issue that you want to take care of uh and so on so that's what the the results thing do and then uh you know we also saw that you know we ran uh the the scan earlier which was this one so now if you go to open tasks open scan tasks we see there was one that was created right here so these are the uh three uh tasks that were created um uh so so you can see that there's a task that is created for the ldap admins for uh the for the issues that it found there the priorities one and two uh issues so this way you know um you can uh you can be assured that uh whenever you're finding whenever the tools scanned scandal findings are found uh there are tasks that are created for the people to go act on uh and uh that's that's what it does and here you can see that hey there are three scan tasks that are open so there's one core finding uh so yeah you can also directly access the scan task config in the schedule scans also in the menu item this was also uh based on the feedback that we received from customers and then the other part that we wanted to also show was the dashboard so when you click on this dashboard item you're gonna basically see some basic uh metrics and obviously this is a brand new instance so we don't we don't have a whole lot of metrics here but you can see that okay hey there are three scan tasks and you know over time you're gonna see uh you know how many tasks were created and so here you also have like uh you know execution by suite what are the suites that you're executing weekly and what are the findings per suite that um that are being uh found uh and then also a trending chart uh for uh the execution as well as the findings for you know last 30 days some basic metrics to see how you're doing and then you can also see that you know the tasks go down or the findings go down that can give you an indication of how healthy your instance is and how useful the tool is that's pretty much it for uh and this is what i was saying i have an idea it takes you to the idea portal uh and a couple of things here is uh you know we we looked at the the checks the checks are uh you know the tool is built on the instant scan plugin uh and there are about five categories that any check could fall fall under uh and we've grouped it logically that all these uh checks for our core platform checks but then really uh they're about like you know user experience security you know upgradeability and so on similarly uh you have that uh for for all of these as well and uh there are um there are high priority uh issues that you want to uh pay attention to uh that's the priority one and two uh like i mentioned uh and and this might vary uh for uh for your implementation as well so that's pretty much for the demo so let's go to the questions and answers i see a few yep we've been working uh caesar and i uh have been okay to answer those so that's great uh again thank you everybody who's been uh you know who have been uh sending those in uh just to recap um and we had questions like uh you know the preferred instance to run this on um in short uh it can be uh installed on ice sub production or a production environment um no problem but my magesh maybe you can take that a step further and have recommendations and and just more information on that okay yeah yeah um yeah obviously you know um you want to maintain uh you know uh health uh and uh issues across your instances um but uh you know to begin with uh obviously you can run it on your your sub broad instances to just get an idea of uh you know what kind of issues you're having and then and then after trying it out and then after you know just uh getting an idea of how to run this tool and what it takes to kind of act on them then you can also do it on your broad instance obviously we recommend that you maintain uh you know you fix these issues across your instances and you know prod instances what would matter for your users um so you can you can do it uh on any instance and i just want to add to that that uh the instance troubleshooter it's a really only application it will not make any changes to any part of the application either either customizations or data wise other than just uh whatever is inside that scope of this distribution here yeah thanks uh thanks caesar for that there's one more question here about the uh does it correlate with the findings from the health scan that is reviewed with us monthly by um by our csa um no there is uh there is no um overlap uh between the two tools uh right now uh but we are working with um the health scan team uh to see how how we could uh you know um make it complementary this app uh was uh developed uh with partnership from the global technical support team like i mentioned earlier which is based on real world issues that customers are running into while the health scan is more about the best practices for upgradability and manageability and that is kind of created as as checks too and another difference is this runs within your instance or the data about your issues table then with your instance while health scan has to be run by somebody uh from servicenow and it is also a paid uh offering while instant structure is a free app excellent um i was just going to recap some of the ones that we answered uh just to give everyone an opportunity to elaborate and oh my gosh if you wanted to elaborate on any of these um yes and i think it's it's good typing you you guys have answered and and we had uh something else to just uh quickly uh show let me bring that up yeah so uh we can share uh these uh kb articles uh you know where there's a there's a troubleshooting uh serving instance troubleshooter uh quick start guide on how to use it and and you know conceptual understanding of what it is and then also there is a detailed user guide that uh obviously um that shows like you know all the details of the functionality on how to use it and where to install it from and more importantly if you want to actually see uh what kind of checks where uh you know the tool uh tool checks for um without having to install the tool um to know what it is you can also uh review that and uh cesar do you want to just maybe take a minute or two just to walk through a couple of checks here i think it may be on mute yes i'll be i was uh go ahead and go to the uh let me see the access control which is the first section yeah oh sorry this is authentication yet yeah so i'm just going to go over a couple of checks again checks are the the the engine that runs this instance troubleshooter uh it engine is is i mean the checks are the brain so the tool is only as good as these checks i'm just going to go just pick a couple of random and and give you a feel of what type of things in the instance we're checking on so the middle one their acls using get real count may cost performance issues this is an important check because htos get run throughout the life span of an instance so every time you click on a form on a list on a report acls are constantly running so it's easy to to imagine a scenario where there's a get road count where we're actually getting a count of all the records in a table inside an acl how that may cause a performance issue um especially if this is a large table with millions of records creating uh just calling a git row count um will definitely will cause some issues so what this check does is it views all the acls get real count if there is one it will alert you to to do something about this um another check let me see can you scroll down to core platform absolutely all right so number two here escape html should be enabled and this is a security check so there are several types of checks this gives me an opportunity to tell you about the types of checks one is performance something in your instance a configuration that can cause performance down the road performance issues down the road another one is this one that we're looking at escape html should be enabled and you'll notice the priority is one it's very critical one this is a security check which means that you have a customization in your instance that if left unattended it may cause security issues so you can read the description a malicious user can inject some code um into one of the uh your ui pages so what this check does is it's it's just check for the property and make sure that the property is set to the right value to prevent this issue um similar to this one is the one right next to it restrict unauthenticated access to images uh apparently there's a property here that you can set on and off if when when when left enabled all of your images are are secured if left set to false all your images might be left for the open public the open internet to to view so that's that's a critical one um let me see you can scroll down to uh go to email please and i'm just gonna touch a couple more here and so uh the third one here guest account does not exist this is this is something that we in in technical support we do get several cases around this issue regarding email the email in order for us to process email we need a guest account because a lot of times the email does not have a user tied to it so in order to make some changes on the instance when the instance receives email it has to be tied to an account well many times a guest account the out-of-the-box guest account gets either inactivated or deleted and that causes email issues and all our consoles are a little bit difficult to troubleshoot or not apparent initially because against the count and emails not tied together logically but they are um i mean some people might not think that they're tight but they in this case they are so what this check does is it just constantly checks whether the the guest account does exist and it's it's actually active um and uh the last two i want to just show you here email reader job is not running it's the fifth one down um another thing that usually does even though email uh in inbound email is active some customers may see that email is not being processed what that means is a lot of times there is a backlog of email um so or either the email reader job just stopped running and is stuck or it is missing or it is uh very busy handling a large job well this this will definitely capture that so in those cases where a customer is not receiving email if they run instance trevor shooter check this check will immediately let them know oh right now there's an issue with email reader job you might want to go there and look at the job and see what it's actually doing and the customer may be able to troubleshoot the instance and get to root cause by themselves avoiding that uh opening a case with support and obviously there's there's another one for the other side of the coin sending email sntp sender job not running which is uh two two down so yeah that's just i just want to give you a a feel of the types of checks there are 178 checks we are currently uh in the process of adding a lot more and like magee said earlier these are all being created by support they are in the front lines they know the patterns they know the the type of cases they get and they are bringing these ideas to us or even some tses are writing them uh writing these checks themselves and uh yeah we're hoping that for version four we'll we'll have a lot more uh checks the more we get the more issues we can get uh we can we can bring forth to the customer that's great say sir oh thank you uh and uh there's one question i want to answer uh what's the difference between booster and uh instant scan app this was asked in the webinar um this is built on top of the instant scan uh plugin uh so and the instant scan plugin uh is available out of the box with the servicenow um you know family release and it is uh it is meant for uh you know um the um product teams to add checks on uh that they think should be um as part of uh their feature uh their features being used uh as intended and um so they they uh they sometimes add uh add checks there so think of that as just more of a platform capability uh for anybody to add checks uh and what we have done is uh we have built this app on top of the instant scan uh and uh based on uh you know feedback from customers and customer support uh to look for issues uh after the fact that the family release goes out and is adopted by customers so and the other difference is uh we can update our app hard or banned uh and uh like quarterly uh um or uh you know fix issues even more frequently than that while the instance scan has to be updated as part of the family release that's another difference but uh instance troubleshooter checks are also part of the instant scan checks um so you can you can see that in the in the in the instance within the instance itself hopefully that answers uh that question uh and what uh you know obviously we would like to return any uh other questions uh we would like to really thank everyone for taking the time to attend this uh event uh and we're really happy to bring this app to you uh and looking forward to hearing more feedback from you so we would definitely um you know ask that you try this and give us feedback on how useful it is and if you have any suggestions for enhancements or checks uh you know please reach out to us through your regular channels uh and uh that'll um or give feedback to us directly from the tool uh that'll reach us and we'll evaluate them for upcoming versions thank you so much yeah yeah and to add to that thank you miguesh as it um you know one of the channels that we really try to promote is that we get a lot of feedback from our customers and we want to be able to meet as many of those requests as possible obviously as our company has scaled over the last well several several years uh that becomes a tougher and tougher um well jobs process and a few years ago we did uh roll out the something called the idea portal let me let me show you what it looks like if you're not familiar um i can stop sharing uh mike sure sorry i just grabbed it from you uh i went directly to the community uh which is a if you're not familiar with the community or you haven't used it that much um just as a side note this is a wealth of information from many many different users we're looking at 300 000 plus users 37 million posts every single year it's particularly helpful for um p4 like lower lower priority uh cases or or questions like how to as where the community can really shine um but there's all kinds of things here so that's just a side note for us specifically we keep track of and then can vote up using the community's input you know different users input the priority of those recommendations or the requests so for instance you know the ability to identify customized code on the instance well that was put in and then it was voted up by four other people we have the structure here and we definitely have ideas coming in where i think we always would love to you know um compose the question to our users uh of of the application from our customers is continue to contribute and and please feel free to put as many suggestions as possible in there and we can help promote those and and your colleagues can help promote those if you have something that really really you want added have have your colleagues at work also log in and promote that up and i assure you that is one of the approaches to get uh your request uh to change from kind of a glimmer in your eye to an actual function within the platform so that's just one thing i wanted to add and then to wrap things up um you know there was also a question about recording we are recording this this webinar and there's a team that manages all of our webinars um you know from under the ask the expert umbrella so i'll be working with them after we wrap up today to be able to publish that and to share it so that you can forward it on to your teams or your colleagues and also um i believe this will be posted to the community in youtube as well so um that's all i had to add i wanted to say again magesh cesar thank you very much for the presentation i'm very excited about um what this has to offer and also we want to thank you the customers for number one taking the time today to hear us out to ask your very good questions but also your thank you for your business and your continued engagement as we continue to improve our platform and offer the products that uh we hope will make a big impact on you thanks a lot mike thank you for coordinating this and thanks for all the help in promoting the app to the community as well with our customers and our sam organization uh this is a team effort this is a collaborative effort across the board within servicenow as well as across the customers in the channel uh i really want to thank everyone for for that and looking forward to i know bringing more value to everyone thank you and stay tuned in the next six months or so um roughly when we uh put out version 4.0 and we'll invite you again we'll we'll post it and we hope to see you again so thank you very much i'll go ahead and wrap things up um caesar um yes did you guys want to add anything else otherwise we'll we'll call it a day no i'm good thank you everyone thank you mike thank you thanks caesar okay okay take care everybody have a good rest of the day everyone thanks thank you bye