all right what do you say Alex ready to jump into it let's do it all right welcome everybody uh we're really excited to host this webinar today uh we're going to be talking um with Alex from Zurich Insurance on how uh he and their team are leveraging servicenow impact specifically within our instance Observer tooling to maximize and optimize their platform health so we got a jam-packed full agenda today so we're going to jump right into it uh first things first we'll take care of some Safe Harbor business this presentation may contain some forward-looking statements so please make your purchasing decisions not upon this particular presentation also a couple other housekeeping items um please use the Q a we're going to have a q a section at the end of this presentation so we want this to be as interactive as possible if you have a question drop it in the question section and we'll make sure to answer those towards the end this session is being recorded and it will be made available on the servicenow community afterwards so if you want to share it or take a look back at it uh we'll share all those links as well um Also let's continue to have this conversation in the community feel free to head over to the impact product Hub on the community at any time to engage with our experts and ask questions that's where we also put out um our release notes and talk about our latest Innovations so definitely check out that impact product Hub and lastly look out for a survey following this session we want to hear your thoughts and hear your feedback so we can continuously improve these types of webinars awesome so without further Ado uh we'll make a quick introductions my name is Jeff hudock I am a staff product manager here at servicenow specifically focused on our observability tooling within the impact platform and I am joined today by Alex I'll let Alex introduce yourself go ahead thanks Jeff my name is Alex Chua and I have been working with servicenow at Zurich insurance for about eight years my main responsibilities include managing the platform across our family of instances along with managing the development work from our internal and external development teams excellent and before we jump into the meat of the the presentation today we did want to start with a quick poll question and we wanted to just gauge the audience and see how how you folks are actually tracking the value you're receiving from the servicenow platform so I'd love to get a feel here on how folks are measuring uh it looks like the results are starting to come in um formal metrics and dashboards is taking a quick win maybe not having a good tracking mechanism in place gut feeling okay kind of mixed results here we'll give a couple of more seconds for folks to to get in and participate into this poll again we're trying to get a feel and understanding for how you are tracking value in in your investments into the servicenow platform and hopefully today we'll we'll highlight how the impacts products and specifically instance Observer can help you accomplish some of these goals give it maybe 20 more seconds and we'll pause this we're slowing on the results it looks like 50 of folks here might not have the best tracking in place and again we'll talk a little bit more about how impact specifically can help address some of those pain points but a good 35 are using formal metrics I think we can go ahead and pause this poll uh looks like we've come to a stopping point here so again front runner maybe not the best mechanisms in place we'll talk and address that today again if you check out that impact Portola also has some has some great content on how you can leverage that product to start tracking the the return on investment within the servicenow platform okay so here let me share these results actually can folks see those results thumbs up all right back out of this excellent so I'm going to start with a quick video introduction on um impact so let me just switch over and share a new screen and we'll start with a quick intro video [Music] three little lessons that add up so much more you are platform owners system admins and the c-suite you have different goals and business outcomes lofty Ambitions and aspirations you are government agencies large corporations businesses that are local companies Global so let's forget one size fits all and get the right fit for you we have reimagined your customer Journey a personalized digital experience built on the now platform a first of its kind solution for your value acceleration we have created servicenow impact see the big picture and track your programs yeah boy you need when you need it from a strategic Vision kpis personalized content and recommendations your fingertips to fast forward your results and impact Squad with you from day one surrounded by experts take action with confidence amplify your bench strength to amplify your expertise targeted guidance to drive bespoke business boards equip yourself with tools and best ideas proactive alerts and developer support help prevent issues before they arise with more free time on your hands hacked rather than react and accelerate value to get returns faster introducing servicenow impact helping you to work smart because when you work the world works excellent I tell you what the content and media teams here never cease to amaze me these videos are awesome so hopefully that gets you a good picture on on what we're talking about here today let me flip back over to our PowerPoint View and we'll jump in straight into this content so um it is my pleasure to talk to you today about impact and what it's all about um after that quick introduction hopefully you got a good taste of that servicenow impact is a value acceleration solution that is designed to maximize your investment within the servicenow platform so for many of those who might have mentioned that you don't have a great way to track that servicenow impact was built specifically with this in mind it combines the predictive software and a human Ingenuity to keep your platform health and your speed to value in a measurable way that you can actually realize your return on investment it's going to offer personalized insights and recommendations on how to continue to accelerate the platform and continue to innovate on the platform it has value tracking features it has industry benchmarking features provides you with best practices content learning premium technical support and so much more all centralized in a beautiful experience that's built and continuously iterated and developed upon directly for you um so today we're going to hear from Alex from Zurich Insurance about how he and his team are using and benefiting from the servicenow impact platform but before we dive in just a quick primer or a refresher for those on what impact is again this is a kind of a new category of software uh called value acceleration and really like what does that mean um it's a well-known statistic that about three quarters of all SAS Investments fail to actually deliver return on investments so you're sending spending a ton of money on these large-scale transformation projects with little to no way to measure your return on investment and that's exactly what we've designed impact to to accomplish a way to accelerate the value for our customers on this the now platform providing you with the tools and guidance and insights to meet your desired outcomes and one of the core elements of impact is actually a product called instance Observer instance Observer is an observability tool that is going to arm you with Rich data and insights on your instances performance something that has never existed before to this degree and certainly never existed before on a single pane of glass so that's what we're going to be focusing on in this session and we're going to hear from Alex today and again on how he and his team are benefiting from instance Observer uh and then towards the end of this presentation we'll close off with a product demo so make sure to stick around for that you don't want to miss out so um quick review uh high level overview on Zurich Insurance and they're kind of uh Journey with the servicenow platform and specifically impact customers since 2014 a highly customized environment they've expanded towards many products and applications on the platform over a hundred thousand users plus over the course of these uh several years with that obviously comes a handful of challenges they uh we're getting complaints and increased complaints following their deployments um they were lacking visibility into performance and they really again were unable to measure the progress that they were making on the platform so the solution um purchased impact in January of 2023 and began incorporating instance Observer into their daily activities the results and the pun intended impact is a 20 Improvement on their performance kpis two times faster uh and and issue troubleshooting and resolution uh they are able to become more proactive in their position towards optimization and maintenance on the platform and have armed themselves with a much more transparent way to present uh their their return on investment and their successes to their leadership teams so with that I want to flip it over Alex can you talk to us a little bit about the zerk journey on servicenow platform which products you are focused on to begin with and to what extent were you customized versus out of the box when you started and how has that changed over time yeah sure thanks stress um well our journey with servicenow started in 2014 we worked together with a third party partner who assisted us with the onboarding process mainly utilizing the its Institute of applications including problem change and Incident Management I joined Zurich a year later in 2015. uh I was coming from a.net and Java background I found service now developer website to be quite helpful you know especially with the ability to utilize a a personal development instance I quickly came to realize that the fields and the layout of our forms and our incidents to be quite different than what I saw in the personal development instance it turns out that the gather requirements uh turn service now into really another version of Remedy uh which it replaced in our organization instead of reviewing and adjusting our own processes to take advantage of what the tool offers we customize serves now to adjust our own processes we quickly came to find out patching and upgrading became more challenging along with the ability to to maintain so in 2018 our leadership team gave us the opportunity to start from scratch with the Jakarta release we internally called it the Jakarta refresh project the main goal to be as close to Autobox as possible oddly enough from a technical standpoint there was less development work because we're trying to leave as much a service not alone the I came to realize the one of the largest challenges came from trying to convince our stakeholders to review and adjust their own established processes to full try to fully take advantage of service now the way that it was intended to be used when processes could not be changed we tried uh to reach a compromise so that when customizations are to be implemented that they are done so in the best manner possible at the moment we have about a hundred thousand users logged in within the last year from the trends that I'm seeing it seems like that number continues to grow more recently we brought on the security operations team utilizing the GRC VR along with adopting the csdn guidelines and practices uh Jeff would you build on to the next one absolutely so I want to talk a little bit more about the the challenges that that came with how you've Advanced on the the servicenow platform can you talk to some of the key challenges that that your business has faced uh as you've grown on the now platform and how easy or challenging it was for you to monitor specifically the performance or platform health of the instances yeah so as our user base has grown and at the trends it looks like it's going to continue to grow uh so have the request to install new application Suites you know we have also brought on new stakeholders along with the user base who may not be familiar with servicenow or with ITIL practices so when a problem is brought to our attention we have to convey why we can't simply promote an update to production during the middle of the workday you know as it triggers a cash flush and ultimately negatively impacts the user experience for our base you know we also have scenarios where configurations may not be implemented in the best way and you know leading to unnecessary load on the system along with performance complaints and you know I believe on the next few slides you'll be able to go into how uh you know how we were able to take advantage of instance Observer and how we could uh how we were able to use it to to our advantage and and ultimately to help out our stakeholders and our user base yeah before we get there um you guys had an influx of inquiries from customers or from users uh kind of reaching out to you and your team how did that affect you and your team and kind of your day-to-day foreign well it also it presented um you know additional workload that we may not have anticipated uh also with your requests for uh specific application Suites or specific plugins that we also may not have information or experience with and so I think if anything it presented us with a a good learning opportunity uh to identify what are the requests for our user base what are they looking for and not just for uh new stakeholders and new new user bases but also with our existing stakeholders and additional features that they were wanting to take advantage of um you know as as new features of functionalities are made available with each with each major upgrade yeah that makes sense okay so let's talk a little bit about your current focuses uh and and what you're doing now to monitor performance can you talk a little bit about your team's current objectives and light of your increased servicenow footprint I think you had a hundred thousand plus users across multiple production instances can you talk a little bit about that yeah so you know at the at the moment or at least at the time uh you know our main attractions with instant observed was to be able to monitor the platform in real time uh to be able to provide transparency uh for business stakeholders you know with any winning performance uh related issues arise you know one of the things that that I find to be a true benefit with Vincent Observer is before when we would go into the instance and look at the you know look at the transactions look at the notes and seeing what's being used I did notice that by doing so I saw my own username on there with the transaction of the information that I was trying to gather and so unintentionally by trying to look into uh you know the activities on on our system I was also unintentionally adding on to the load um and I think this may be something that we could get into during the uh the infamous Observer demo but I think that was just a really nice uh uh a really nice feature uh to be able to monitor the performance and the health of our instance without negatively impacting the instance itself yeah that's a fantastic use case so now that you guys are leveraging the instance Observer products on on kind of more of a day-to-day um can you share about your your decision to actually purchase impact and the value that you're getting out of it specifically with instance Observer and how it's kind of made your your life and your team's life easier in monitoring instance performance yeah sure um you know at as I mentioned before you know as our user base has grown you know servicenow is becoming more and more of a vital application here in Zurich uh you know an example of how we were able to take advantage of Vince's Observer is prior to it and we used to promote updates to production every month and so you would take advantage of our of a monthly change window to do so since adopting an instant Observer uh you know we're able to monitor the usage the load patterns to identify when over the course of the week when is the load on the system at a low Point meaning as as we have received more and more requests to deploy more frequently um you know we're able to take advantage of this information and say you know between Sunday through Saturday it seems like Wednesday evenings for whatever reason load on the system was the lowest point of the week and so with this information you know we have since opened up our change Windows to allow for a weekly deployment uh schedule uh just instead of a monthly um you know I'm I'm happy and grateful to say that that our leadership team have have committed significant resources uh towards the growth and stability of service now here at Zerg and you know now with the introduction to in participation uh to the IMPACT Program that's fantastic and I think um in a couple of offline conversations we've talked a little bit about how you've been able to leverage instance observer in your sub production instances um actually using the tool to look at update sets prior to going into production can you talk a little bit about how your team is kind of Incorporated that into the larger release life cycle yeah and so you know instant Observer is not only available for the production instance but as you mentioned before we do utilize it to be able to monitor basically all of our instances and that's just managed by a simple configuration on on the site um you know whenever we have new plugins that are requested to be installed you know we are our processes is to initially do so on a Sandbox instance and then once uh once things are at a comfortable level we'll then progress on to installing on our sub production instances and and eventually the production but during that process you know we're able to to leverage this Observer to see you know what are the what are the metrics you know how how are the activities this week compared to the activities prior to the new activities uh that we've undertaken and so just to be able to take and this may also be something that that we could see on a demo but to to get a nice overlay of the activities that have that have occurred between different time points um and that's been really nice and very valuable uh it's also something that what I really like what I enjoy about the tool is not only does it offer uh you know metrics and numbers but off also translates that to uh you know beautiful looking charts and graphs that we're able to relay that along to our stakeholders and also to our our leadership team too where it's more understandable that makes sense and then one one more question here instance Observer has um an alerting functionality where you can kind of set and configure alerts to more proactively respond to potential issues is uh kind of a leading indicator to Performance can you talk a little bit about how you've Incorporated the alerting functionality into your day-to-day processes yeah so you know pre-fore prior to um we would be more of a in a reactive mode as opposed to a proactive mode and so sometimes we wouldn't even realize there was anything going on unless we were to have you know automated P2 rarely sometimes but you know sometimes P1 cases uh from server-sideless monitoring systems and so once you do receive those emails we would then be in a reactive mode to say what is going on uh what are the new activities that could have possibly um added or introduced to um you know allow these uh performance metrics uh to be seen but now we're able to utilize instant Observer to to constantly monitor uh not just production but all of our other instances uh to see you know what are the transaction times what are the the average uh server response times and so it's it's something that we've taken into and accommodated into basically our our daily routine you know when we normally log in and and correctly check throughout the day that makes sense and again when we get into the product demo we'll be able to show and highlight some of the the features and functionality we're discussing right now so you guys have seen a lot of success you've adopted this and it's kind of in your day-to-day process can you talk to me a little bit about what life was like before instance Observer on the impact platform and then what it's like now how has your life changed and improved you know before you know there there would be uh monitoring tools uh that were available within the system um I unfortunately found it a bit challenging to use uh it could possibly be due to the size of her instance the amount of activity or inner instance any any time of the day and so it was it was challenging before um and also with what I mentioned before with monitoring the the active transactions and the active nodes now I was also unintentionally adding load to the system um but you know with instant Observer we're able to take advantage of this new tool to to be able to to Monitor and troubleshoot in a more efficient manner that makes sense 20 plus Improvement on Performance Health kpis fantastic stat two times faster troubleshooting are there any tools in particular that you're leveraging the most when you're in there kind of looking for uh kind of issue uh remediation well you know with what you've mentioned before about the alerts that's something that that we constantly look into and try to to take advantage of and leverage I would like to say that uh you know probably the most used feature within the tool is just be able to get a gauge on what the average server restart server response times are what the average user transactions are we would on occasion receive requests or complaints actually uh performance issues and you know when we when we receive those requests we go into instant Observer and to see what what are the actual metrics and data that uh that is being reported on the on the platform or on the system there will be times when everything looks fine and at times it will the system will be performing even better than expected and what we've come to find out is uh these other issues that are being ported with more on the client side you know with our user base across the globe and with a variety of methods of accessing accessing servicenow some go through VPN it's it's difficult to get a good gauge because we're all accessing service now in a multitude of ways and so it's nice to be able to present the charts and the graphs and also the data to our stakeholders and also to our business take or to the affected users to let them know well this is what we're actually seeing on the system side maybe there's something else some other variables at play and so it allows us to enhance the conversation of what are the things that that we may possibly look at that may also be unintentionally affecting uh the experience yeah excellent well I I really appreciate you walking us through that um I want to spend a couple of minutes talking a little bit deeper on instance Observer um this product was built and created to address the the paint points that Alex kind of just walked us through um a lack invisibility into performance um customers were much more reactive um their users are filing tickets and complaining about performance issues this product was built to have a much more proactive stance being able to tell you and your teams when something is wrong prior to your end users being impacted and giving tangible information actually act and resolve those issues we wanted to enable our customers to be confident in releasing and releasing more quickly on the platform so that they can continue to push Innovation and not be hesitant to do weekly deployments because of the potential of performance impacts and also again with a data driven approach to make sure that you know exactly where your team should be investing into enhancing performance across the product and then finally just to continue to reduce that operational overhead and the technical debt that just happens while you're going through large-scale software development projects we needed a way to track progress and ensure that performance was headed in the right direction and like many posted in that poll there was a a kind of a gap in the ability to actually effectively and efficient efficiently report out on the successes that the teams were having related to platform health so instance Observer was created to directly address these pain points and hopefully you've been able to take away how it is has drastically improved the lives of Alex and the teams over at Zurich the key features and products that are built and delivered through instance Observer have all of these key issues in mind whether it's the ability to set self-service alerts to be again proactive and monitoring server response time or user transactions or job cues our performance charts where you can kind of go in and see at a real-time glance at how your performance is performing or how your instance is performing at that moment in time and then how it's performed over time the reporting functionalities to to provide those clean dashboards for executive report outs triage in the event that something does go not according to plan tools are built directly into the product to allow you to pinpoint exactly where those problems uh lie and allow you to much more rapidly resolve those issues and then again visualizing these Trends over time so you can make sure that you're continuously improving on the actual Pro platform itself one of the unique characteristics that Alex touched on is that this is actually an off off instance application so there's no dependency on your instance being up in live uh for you to gain access to all of the Telemetry that's made available through the product in addition to that there's no additional load that's put on your system while you're doing any sort of reporting or troubleshooting again it's a completely off instance product which is one of the the unique characteristics of this feature so without further Ado let's switch over and actually jump into the software now everyone wants to see what we've been talking about them this whole time so I've logged in here to instance Observer you can navigate to this particular feature directly from the impact portal there are links in the platform Health upon the monitor page you can single sign on here or you can navigate directly to the the product URL this is the first page you'll land on this is the dashboard high level overviews of performance and kpis uh on your instances you'll have the ability to view all of your instances like Alex mentioned earlier in this demo environment we just have one set up here today instance availability are we up are we down how are things looking across the farm do we have any alerts that need to be immediately addressed those monitoring alerts are the ones that servicenow is going to do proactively on your behalf the self-service alerts we'll talk about here in a minute are the ones that you can configure across your instances and you have the ability to manipulate and configure the thresholds on when you want to be alerted upon which specific data points and then finally have some information on the cluster details Etc but let's jump over to one of the probably the most highly used reports and Alex this is probably where you might start your day on our daily performance metric report high level kpis on the particular instance on how things are performing right now at this moment in time so you can see here across the board we're looking pretty good instances up I have a couple of notifications on standby lag anomalies and response time anomalies so as the platform owner or sysadmin I might want to hone in on these as I continue to to work my way through you know my daily checks here we also have some additional health checks Down Below on transaction counts compared to yesterday and compared to the last 30 days we're highlighting the top 10 slow transactions at this moment in time top 10 slow queries at this moment in time and also the top 10 longest running jobs so if you know you have a frequent job that that is running long it might show up here or in the event that you have one that that should have already been completed again you'll be able to see the top 10 longest running in the duration that it has been running and then finally if you have any open critical support cases with now support those are going to show up here in the state in which those are currently in so let's take a look we we mentioned that this response time might be an issue or a potential warning flag that we wanted to look into so if I go over to the performance drop down this is where I'm going to have the ability to really deep dive into these various data points across the these performance indicators on our instance so let's go into the transaction in response time I can select the instance in which I want to run this report against I can select the date range that I want to look at if I want to compare this to last week or the moving average I have some options that I can continue to play with to really expand out the the capability of the the data that we'll see key performance indicators listed up top on this one we can see user transaction count with how this has been trending over the last uh 24 hours you see folks are starting to to log on and get active in their workday here and you'll notice that up here we have an anomalies so this is an AI driven feature that was just released with our Vancouver release which is um in real time doing AI anomaly based detection showing you um where you might have spikes or valleys within your data so you can see here um at this moment in time we did have an anomaly on user transaction probably nothing to be widely worried about in this particular example and if we again continue to scroll down this server response time is the one that we were looking at earlier so you can see how the server has been responding over the last 24 hours the again the anomalies tool is going to be able to highlight and pinpoint exactly where you saw anomalies in this particular category over the last 24 hours so if we wanted to zoom in and get more detail we can see here at this moment in time the server response time did increase so maybe there was a job that was running long or a queue that was getting backed up that we need to look at and continue to evaluate if we need to you know do anything to actually remediate an issue here a ton of data across the the board here another great report that folks are using quite often is our job details report um again I can select the instance I can select the date range in which I want to kind of analyze I can see the counts in the transaction count and the duration transactions of of what's happening over the course of the the time period that I've selected um again more importantly here I want to look at the anomalies so you can see here uh early morning of the 27th we had 10 anomalies that happened if I wanted to get more details on these jobs I can click on this bar right here and click on view details and this is actually going to show me um exactly what was going on at this moment in time between 4 and 5 a.m on the 27th it's going to show you all of the jobs and accounts that were being executed at this moment in time and then if I flip over to the anomalies tab these are the 10 jobs that were firing anomalies that were performing outside of their normal ranges during this exact moment in time so this async scripts job might be one that I want to start investigating as a platform owner or CIS admin Alex I'm going to quickly pause and ask a question over to you do you find yourself using um one of these particular performance reports more one more than the other um or is there one that you would like me to highlight here you know for ours um you know I like I like looking at the database growth I like looking at the user information um and with a couple that you mentioned before the performance metrics uh the server metrics uh just to give me an idea of what is going on that back end what are the uh the activities that our user base is is triggering um and so it just allows me to get a good gauge on you know what has been going on uh you know before it came on as I mentioned before our user base is truly across below from the Americas to emea to the Asia Pacific regions and with with our user base working around the clock it allows me to get a a good historical point of view of what's happened here in the last day or last several days yeah that's fantastic the it looks like I have an issue here in my demo instance on primary database this should show a trended view over time on my date range of how these particular tables have been growing or decreasing and then it'll also list out the specific tables so I can come in here and see some statistics on which which are my largest tables which ones have been growing faster this will really help Alex like you were mentioning with your data management and potentially your archiving um Solutions one of the other great features of instance Observer that we talked about earlier is the ability to configure and set up alerts so let me hop over I want to highlight this feature there are 27 metrics that we can configure alerts across the environments for so you can see transactions or semaphore Q depth event cues there's just a ton of metrics that are available to configure um and be alerted in a proactive stance specific to your instance so we have here response time for example if I wanted to configure this alert I just click on that card we have servicenow recommendations so each one of these alerts is going to come kind of with an out of the box recommendation from servicenow but we all know each instance is unique each organization is unique so you have the ability to kind of tailor and customize these alerts to make the most sense for your Institution once you have the configuration set you can actually test these alerts so this is going to run a scenario over the last seven days that will show you how many times this alert would have been triggered under the conditions that you had just set so you can see here in this summary I would have had zero hits over the last seven days for the criteria that was set on the prior screen so maybe that's a little too high maybe I want to bring it down a little bit or actually maybe this might be just right for my Institution from there I can configure a notification rule this is really going to Define who and how are notified when this event or trigger were to be fired so there's a variety of methods for communication and let's flip over there and look at those uh and how we can actually notify our teams of alerts within the system so here um you can see we can email so email is available to all tiers on instance Observer SMS a service direct servicenow integration and then third-party Integrations are available to our Advanced and total tier customers so if you want to you know send out a text message to a group or do a third-party integration to another source we have those functionalities to to leverage a web hook and go directly to whichever third party you would like to but again this is a highly recommended highly used feature of instance Observer putting you in a much more proactive stance to manage your platform Health than what was traditionally a more reactive waiting on users to kind of complain and send in tickets finally um I want to highlight our help section here help section has a great resource of video tutorials every metric that is documented or is leveraged in the product is documented here along with um KB knowledge articles on issue resolution so if you see a spike in server response times we're going to link you directly to a knowledge article on how to investigate and how to remediate across these various metrics this is also where we'll put all of our release notes so you can see release notes for 14.0 this is our latest Vancouver release where that AI anomaly detection capability came out a handful of other great features and we continuously iterate and develop on this product we put out quarterly releases so continuously pushing Innovation on this product and then finally great resources for how to how to use the product how to leverage the features and functionality to make sure that you're leveraging it most effectively to manage your day-to-day operations so that's just a quick highlight of the power of instance Observer on the impact platform awesome so before we go want to leave you with a handful of resources like I mentioned earlier this recording from today's event is going to be made available on the impact Community Forum so make sure you log in there and can access this recording you can visit us at servicenow.com forward slash impact to learn a little bit more about servicenow and how it's going to benefit you and your particular role and then if you want to Deep dive into servicenow impact please jump over to experience servicenow impact and look and have a deep dive into all the features and functionality that are made available through the impact product excellent so with that um thank you all for attending we really appreciate it um again if you uh all these resources are made available for you this recording will be available at the end of the day Alex thank you so much for your time thanks for joining thanks Anthony thank you to service now team and along with uh hello to everyone else that joined the webinar thank you all thanks folks