let's use the session debug feature to troubleshoot slowness in your service now instance I've run a transaction and it seems to be running slow what can I use to help me identify the issue one of the recommended tools you can use to troubleshoot slowness is using the session debug feature in service now let me demonstrate I'm in my transaction and I want to launch the session log in the banner I'll click the all navigation menu then I'll enter the system Diagnostics application in the filter field look for the session debug category and select enable all now I'm on the session log page with no transactions or logs appearing I'll need to return to my original transaction and run it again now back on the original transaction tab for this demonstration I'll do a refresh of the window window now I'll go back to my session log tab to see the transaction and log details and review the output there are some useful features in the session log you can clear the log download the log or even amend the filters if you want to remove any noise or clear up the output screen the important word to search for in the log output is excessive as those are the slow queries that need to be investigated if you have a resource costly SQL query that's taking let's say more than 8 seconds to run like the image shows then you can try the index suggestion feature see knowledgebase article 078 2916 for information on using this feature in your main UI window where you reproduce the transaction scroll down to the debug output under the query header find the expensive query and click to open that will open a record in the slow query module when looking for issues the focus should be on where most of the transaction time is spent it is self-explanatory if most of the time is spent processing ACLS then that area should be the focus if UI action time is high then UI actions should be investigated if SQL time is the highest the dat database queries must be reviewed