The ServiceNow MID Server is an integral part of a successful deployment, and its features and functionality have grown significantly over the years. It’s a crucial component to keep up and running. Many customers rely on the MID Server for integrations, Discovery, Service Mapping, Cloud Management, Event Management, Operational Intelligence, Log Ingestion, and more. Therefore, it's essential that your MID Servers stay operational to prevent disruptions to the critical business processes that depend on them.
Most organizations have teams that support the infrastructure that keeps the actual servers up and running and often have event monitoring in place to ensure uptime and availability. However, it's always nice to have additional options and safeguards in place. Here are a few simplistic ways to keep tabs on your MID Server (most of which are already out-of-the-box and require minimal setup).
The ServiceNow instance sends a synthetic transaction via the Heartbeat probe to the MID Servers every five minutes. If the instance doesn’t detect a response from a MID Server, that server is marked as down. This will be important to keep in mind for the methods listed below. The heartbeat frequency can be adjusted by changing the scheduled job “MID Server Monitor.”
Here are some ways to keep tabs on your MID Server:
- Notification: The MID Server table (
ecc_agent) has a prebuilt notification that is out-of-the-box (OOB). All you need to do is provide a recipient. The notification fires when the MID Server status changes to "Down." This notification is already activated but doesn't know who to send it to. Simply navigate to it and provide a recipient. - Lifecycle Event [mid_server_event]: This recently introduced table tracks MID Server events such as up, down, upgrading, invalidated, validated, and removed. This table gives you more of a timeline view of the state (including dates/times) compared to the MID Server table (
ecc_agent), which only provides the current status. Access this table via direct navigation (mid_server_event.list), the left navigation (MID Server > Profiles and Deployments > MID Server Lifecycle Events), or the UI action on a MID Server labeled "Lifecycle Events" in the Related Links section. - Resource Threshold Alerts: These alerts help monitor allocated CPU and memory. The configured alerts push data into the MID Server Issue (
ecc_agent_issue) table. This method provides insight into potential issues before they impact your server’s performance. - Application Insights: While this feature is being prepared for future deprecation in Xanadu, it’s worth mentioning if you need to trigger flows based on ECC queue thresholds. Application Insights is the best way to do this. You can request and install it via the ServiceNow Store, but you will need to request MetricBase via Support in order to use Application Insights. Once installed, you can set up thresholds based on specific ECC metrics you’re concerned with. This is a more advanced type of monitoring because it does more than simple lifecycle event tracking.
- Event Management: If you are licensed for ITOM Event Management, you can leverage its framework to monitor the MID Server and other areas of event management. Navigate to Event Management > Administration > Self-Health Monitoring. Many monitoring configurations exist out-of-the-box, but we are specifically going to look at the “MID Server Threshold Alerts.” These alerts create events and alerts based on how you’ve configured Event Management. You can use flows and other automations to create incidents or other ticket types based on your needs.
For any of the methods listed above that place data into a table, you can take a variety of approaches based on complexity to meet your monitoring needs:
- Notifications
- Business Rules, Flows, or Workflows
a. Use these to trigger notifications
b. Create incidents or create/update other ticket types - Dashboards