HealthScan 101

HealthScan is the big brother of Instance Scan.

TLDR

ServiceNow HealthScan helps you understand and improve the health of your ServiceNow instance. Built on best practice definitions gathered from analyzing thousands of instances, this tool quickly scans your ServiceNow instance to provide data points across five key categories: security, upgradability, performance, manageability, and usability. HealthScan is used during implementation (Sprint Scan) and while running your ServiceNow instance.

Findings from a HealthScan help you understand where you may have areas for improvement. These data-driven insights help you form recommendations to optimize your instance’s configuration so you can realize maximum value from the platform and your applications.

Benefits

• Less customization: By requiring scans as part of the coding process, we have, through early detection, been able to reduce customizations and improve overall performance by implementing cleaner code. Instant feedback also teaches developers better ways to code.
• Readiness for release upgrades: HealthScan analysis has helped us incorporate best practices from day one. We are more careful about modifying an out-of-the-box file. As a result, our upgrades are faster and smoother. For example, in London, we had 30 skipped files, but by Madrid we had reduced that number to 19. We can take advantage of upgrades much more quickly to improve processes and efficiency.
• Managing the instance is simpler: HealthScan has reduced the number of information logs being generated by 86%. As a result, developers can identify and fix issues more quickly, which then makes it easier to manage the instance.
• Centralized best practices: HealthScan incorporates a core set of definitions, including hundreds of KPIs and best practices, into one, easy to use place. This value increases as the number of definitions increases and more data are collected and analyzed. As the library of best practices expands, the quality of our code in all our instances will improve. In the below example, HealthScan generated more than 100,000 findings, which developers were able to reduce by 92% in just six weeks, thus improving our instance health in a short period of time. 

Key takeaway:

• The average overall score for a healthy instance is 80% to 85%
• To increase the overall score of an instance focus on: security, upgradability and performance. Manageability and usability are less important.

Resources:

• https://www.servicenow.com/content/dam/servicenow-assets/public/en-us/doc-type/resource-center/case-study/cs-healthscan.pdf
• https://www.servicenow.com/content/dam/servicenow-assets/public/en-us/doc-type/success/quick-answer/health-scan-instance-health.pdf
• https://www.servicenow.com/content/dam/servicenow-assets/public/en-us/doc-type/data-sheet/ds-healthscan.pdf
• https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/manage-health-your-servicenow-instance-via-tracker-chinara-mammadova-zyzze/