all right well everyone thank you very much for joining us today to speak about developer support and impact my name is Ben titsy and I'm a product manager in the impact bu I'm joined by two servicenow experts in Amy johanning and Nina Narayanan and would you both mind giving a quick introduction of of yourselves and your roles as well hey everyone my name is Nina narainan I am a director with customer service and support I've been with service now for over nine years and I'm here to help you today Amy I think you're on mute thank you uh my name is Amy johanning I am a service owner and portfolio manager for impact Support Services I've been here for 12 and a half years and I too I'm here to talk to you all about developer support fantastic thank you both so why are we here today obviously we're here to talk about developer support developer support is an incredibly valuable and Powerful feature of impact some of the use cases for why a customer would use developer sport is that it will allow the customer to interact with servicenow experts to review customizations the customer is has in place this is a super premium support feature and it's restricted to Advanced and impact sorry Advanced and total impact so let's let's jump in to our agenda first we're going to cover what is developer support second we're going to cut we're going to cover the scope of what developer support covers third we're going to discuss how you can best engage developer support fourth we're going to talk to a customer that has used developer support extensively and five we're going to end with some q a so let's jump in Amy can you kick us off to what is developer support I'd be happy to if you uh would just thank you so impact as uh as Ben had mentioned impact pardon me developer support is available to customers that have purchased the impact Advanced and total entitlement um keep going please thank you this uh this service is to help you customize or pardon me it is to help you troubleshoot customizations customizations that have been working on the platform and then for whatever reason have stopped working um we want to make sure that the customizations that you do perform on the platform continue to work properly and that your instance remains stable and performant so that is what developer support is in a nutshell now Nina is going to talk through the scope thank you Amy uh let me walk you through the scope of developer support like Amy said the developer support program is designed to provide valuable assistance in troubleshooting customizations we can help you identify and resolve issues like script errors configuration conflicts or any unexpected behavior that you would see in custom code after an upgrade our developer support team can guide you to uh with the best practices for the platform like a good example would be how do I use this API correctly to get these results we can also provide access to some pre-approved and certified scripts or code Snippets that can be used to solve some specific problems that you may be running into like searching for a society that conflicts with some piece of your custom code or if you have a date time widget on a form and it's throwing an error we can help with the code snippet that can be used to check if the data is in future or not however it is important to note that developer support does not include services like code development or implementation assistance so we don't write custom code and cannot help with building custom applications for you similarly this is not a code review service neither is it a testing service so our Focus here is to help you troubleshoot your existing customization on the servicenow platform also developer support does not cover third party applications again our primary scope is to assist with servicenow platform itself and its native functionalities so if you have specific issues or questions related to third-party applications you may need to reach out to the to the respective vendors or their support team or document or their documentation so with that if you can just go to the next slide then so if you're wondering what to expect um all developer support cases are created as P3 cases what that means is that it will default to a P3 response and a response as well as a relief SLA but you still have the ability to escalate it if there's a business reason or if you just would like management oversight or visibility now servicenow is committed to providing if you just go back servicenow is committed to providing uh the best possible assistance to address your customization issue but there are certain scenarios especially with intricate issues sometimes Sams May recommend a Professional Services engagement for faster resolution and it's entirely based on the complexity of the code that we are dealing with next slide open so um to help us help you better we request that you please provide us with designated contacts who are proficient with the platform we expect that the contacts know the infrastructure on your side as well as someone who is knowledgeable about the customizations that exist on your instance we will need you to provide us with a sub-production instance so that we can actively troubleshoot on it because we will be making changes on that uh on the instance so we don't want to touch your production by any means um we also ask that you narrow down the issue to around 200 lines of code or fewer and more importantly that it is adequately commented so that we know what your customization is actually doing um also we will expect the designated contacts to advise on any infrastructure issues if any that may impact the customization that we are actually troubleshooting at hand next slide please okay so now that we've covered the scope the expectation and how we can effectively work together I wanted to talk through an example of a recent developer support case at a very high level so we had a designated developer support contact request a troubleshooting assistance on a rest outbound endpoint that was failing now this contact had reviewed their implementation and actually narrowed the issue to the end point actually failing only when it was used in a flow action step so he tested and it worked fine when they tested it through the rest outbound message as well as through Postman but it returned a bad request when it was used in a flow action so when they narrowed down the issue for us we were able to troubleshoot swiftly on their sub-production instance we tried adding authorization headers we tried it with mid server we tried it without mid-server then we reviewed the checked licensing and security restrictions we then identified the problem as a parameter in the request payload that was not encoded correctly so this is a classic example of how we can work together to help you troubleshoot customization issues I hope that helped I hope this helps this use case over to you um Amy yeah okay so how do I actually submit a developer support case and ensure that it gets to the right person well first of all log into now support and hit the create a case button oh I guess I had this first thank you five Advanced so let's go over to this uh name contacts can open a developer support case they have five you have five seats if you have an advanced package and you have 10 total or 10 seats if you have a total package support is available in English Monday through Friday eight to five and those hours are aligned to your time zone now let's decide or let's now let's go through uh how do we open a case login to dial support um click the button that says create a case and at the bottom if you have access to developer support if you have your named contact and you have purchased impact Advanced or total you can hit the I need developer support there is a it's at the bottom and it says premium at the top so that you know it's only for you once you hit that button you're gonna see a box pop-up that will provide you with some guidelines and some instructions for what we need to see or what we would like to see in the case notes um read the guidelines to make sure that what you have is covered by desk support and that you are providing us the right level of detail so that we can help you troubleshoot finally you will just fill out the fill out the form provide us with the steps to reproduce the 200 lines of code um etc etc and hit submit once you hit submit you'll get a case number that you can then use in order to search for updates but developer support cases are also listed in your my cases you should be able to see them there as well and with that I think we'll turn that back over to you Ben fantastic thank you very much Amy and Nina what we'd love to talk about next is a customer testimony and we'd like to take Dropbox Dropbox has done an excellent job of integrating developer support into their products design coding and release process and so we've spoken with Priyanka at Dropbox she is a servicenow admin and Dropbox has released or they're working on many products from servicenow HR custom scoped apps itsm legal SPM and so what we'd like to do is to share with everyone the conversation that we had with Dropbox all right we're here today to discuss developer support best practices and we're meeting with Priyanka who works at Dropbox and Dropbox has been very effective at incorporating developer support into their processes and so Barack would you like to give a quick introduction to yourself and then we can jump in with a few questions Dropbox I've been with Dropbox almost one and a half years so we support various modules in servicenow recently we are going live with PSM um I'm based out of Pennsylvania so yeah we support various modules like HR vrm we have some some custom scoped apps we have ik some modules we have a legal is going to be onboarded and we have SPM so uh yeah we are in the process of establishing our cmdb make sure our cmdb process so yeah it's all about me that's great thank you so why don't we start how has developer support helped with with dropbox's development process overall productivity or Tech debt uh so I'm teaching how to develop a support whenever we are having some issues with the customization or where we need some help extra help from service now so recently we encountered an issue with like where we have an integration with uh other AI bot called Max so uh we ran into an issue of transferring to a live agent basically we turned off the virtual agent of service now and we are using Max bot which is integrated with slack and when we went live with when we're trying to like go live with PSM we were looking for we were trying to a live agent transfer that time we bumped into an issue the live agent transfer did not happen and it was a blocker for us so that point at that point of time I we do know that service now regular support will not help us with the customizations but we reached out to developer support but they turned around like within one day and they were able to fix the issue and it solved our problem or that just an example of the use case how we are utilizing the developer support but definitely the team is very helpful whenever like we ran into some issues with the customization so uh they are spending time and just getting back to us and it is helping us to unblock ourselves and just move forward with our our customizations or like with our issues that's great to hear and I think that's a really helpful use case what are some other case use cases where you've used developer support and you've found it to be a really good fit uh some other use cases on the workspace side of it like we have some of the configurable workspaces there obviously we discussed uh configure those workspaces for our customs programs we bumped into multiple issues with the workspace like those are like pretty much out of the box issues but I think there are associated problem tickets but team predicting to it and they found out that these are the problem tickets which already associated with these cases which we have raised so uh at least they gave the problem ticket and they just let us know that like in which version those problems tickets is going to be addressed so those are the couple of the use cases uh which you can think of and then yeah apart from the workspace there were uh another scenarios as well on the HR when we were going live with the max what we wanted to update one of the scripting include which is coming out of the box so at that point also team raised developer support to utilize and just to understand more uh in depth like how how it is going to affect if we are going to touch the out of the box functionality those are couple of use cases but yeah that's great so it sounds like it tends to be around a matrix go live event and you're looking at some of the custom scripts that are created and trying to make sure that they will still work in the new when the ghost happens yeah okay that's great thanks so another question I would have is it seems like Dropbox has done a good job of integrating developer support into a part of the product development and release process and so my question would be what are some steps that you've taken to make everybody aware of developer support so that it can be such a prominent element I always tend to reach for developer support because I don't know that their prompt in response and of course reader is helping us to follow up like if there are any delays or something so I always tell our team to just use developer support if it is a critical issue which we were running on our spending so much time to debug because we have additional support from service now to leverage it and just use it that that is the mode of communication or that's how we are using the developer support on our end among ourselves within the team that's great thank you um my next question would would be in your experience is it easy to submit a developer support request yeah it is it is straightforward like how you use the heist High portal the same way just that in sort of a regular case you just have to select the developer support and just submit it so yeah it is pretty straightforward great is it easy have you have you had any challenges um with tracking the status of open developer support tickets not really like uh it is like same similar to the other case right as I mentioned so it was easy and I know that the dedicated team is assigned to it because how do I know because most of our cases goes to the same team so I don't know that they're responding so yeah it's easy to track and I don't see any difficulty over there that's great thank you so I have only a couple questions left so the next one have you observed any measurable improvements in code stability or performance as a result of using developer support um I don't think somebody raised any case as such to improve performance or anything but whenever we are running into these load road blockers or the issues where uh we are in a crunch of time that's where like I think we've used developer support probably I think we should start exploring that side of it and just to reduce our Tech depth or any understanding more best practices from developer support I think we should explore it but till now these are the areas we have used and I think we should just go a little further and utilize developer support to reduce our Tech tips I think so whenever we have some questions or like a decision making to reduce the tech depth so that point of time I think we should leverage it and just yeah explore on that side of it right um and then lastly are there any specific tips or best practices that you would recommend to customers so that they can maximize the benefits of developer support um I think uh on my in my experience like as I mentioned like uh since I know that there is a team and they are helping us so I think before going to the regular support we should just go to the developer support and uh get the help because because if you raise a normal ticket obviously it goes to a different queue and you have to wait for the engineer whereas in the developer support there's a dedicated team assigned to our account so obviously they'll be on top of it and it reduces our time or uh yeah we can find the solutions better way I think so that's the approach I would say to others maybe yeah this is our approach yeah fantastic that's great to hear Priyanka thank you so much for joining us and we're really excited to see all the success that Dropbox has been having with impact and developer support more broadly and we're excited about the things to go yeah sure okay thank you again yeah thank you so much for your time all right so we we've been a lot of places in the last 25 minutes we've looked at what is developer support we've looked at what's the scope how to engage developer support and um I think it'd be great to open up the floor to q a and so um are there any questions that people have top of mind um around how to take advantage of developer sport it can be anything at all and I'm happy to kick it off so one of the things that we hear every once in a while is why are we limited to 200 lines of code and so Amy Nina would one of you be able to respond to why we have that limitation in place sorry Amy I think you're on mute sorry I was going to say yes I'd be happy to um so what we what we're expecting is that a your code has worked at some point in the past and B that you are familiar with what your code has been meant to do even the comments obviously help but we want to interact with someone who really understands what the code is meant to do and can read it um so 200 lines of code is meant to compartmentalize and segment a section of of the code the custom code so that it can be narrowed down on your side in order to you know get it down to a place where you know that hey it worked all the way through all the way through these lines all the way through these sections here's where it's failing and that will be able that will allow us to Target um and and clarify exactly where something might be broken or not working correctly so that's kind of why we do the 200 lines of code we don't actually do we don't actually you know count them to make sure that they fall within any sort of uh parameters but it's it's simply meant to get us to the actual area of the custom code so that we can focus directly in the place that that you know that it's failing Nina it just helps us get resolution for you as quickly as possible and that's why I got that 200 lines of code approximate 200 lines of code that we asked for that's fantastic thank you both for that context I'll offer another question one thing that we hear from time to time is why is developer support limited to a P3 designation I can help uh with that Ben so developer support when when it is created it gets defaulted to a P3 and the reason behind it is because we are going to review customization right and we have to take the time to understand so that we can give you accurate responses and the relief is as quick as possible so I I do understand in some scenarios you know there's going to be uh things that become business critical out of nowhere right if we we understand that and for such scenarios we we have the option to escalate those cases when you escalate we will make sure that we continue to give our best effort um and we work um 24 7 to help you achieve what you're looking for so there is an option but it is defaulted to P3 just because we need the time to understand uh the customization that we are looking at I hope that's fantastic thanks Nina are there any other questions and that's okay if there's if there's not I know there's been a lot of information and so I'm sure that people are digesting all right well then thank you everyone for joining this has been very productive and I think it's been helpful to walk everybody through developer support and to have experts like Amy and Nina join us for that Journey so thank you again thank you thanks guys