Performance Analytic indicators to measure application performance

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Performance Analytic indicators to measure application performance

    Performance Analytics (PA) indicators help ServiceNow customers monitor the count of incidents, problems, changes, and closed change requests related to business applications. This insight allows you to evaluate and improve the performance of your applications effectively using data sourced from PA within the Enterprise Architecture (EA) module.

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    Key Features

    • Scheduled PA Jobs: To generate accurate application performance scores, run the PA jobs in the following order daily:
      • PA Incident Daily Data Collection
      • PA Change Daily Data Collection
      • PA Problem Daily Data Collection
      • Enterprise Architecture Scheduled Job to load indicators and compute application scores
    • Historic Data Processing: For data older than six months, use Performance Analytics Premium (plugin com.snc.pa.premium.apm) and run historic data collection jobs in the same ordered sequence before regenerating EA scores.
    • Score Generation Frequency: Indicator scores are generated based on their configured frequency:
      • Monthly scores on the last day of the month
      • Quarterly scores on the last day of the quarter
      • Yearly scores on the last day of the year

      Note: Fiscal periods must align with the time zone used for score generation.

    • Data Collection Frequency: The EA indicator’s frequency must be equal to or greater than the data source indicator frequency. For example:
      • Monthly EA frequency collects from monthly data sources
      • Quarterly EA frequency collects from monthly and quarterly data sources
      • Yearly EA frequency collects from monthly, quarterly, and yearly data sources
    • Yokohama Release Update: Daily frequency for PA data source indicators is removed; any existing daily indicators are automatically updated to monthly frequency by the RemoveDailyFreqAndUpdatePAIndicator fix script.
    • Display Limitations: If many business applications exist, PA scoresheets may not display all breakdowns due to system property limits:
      • com.snc.pa.scoresheet.maxelements controls max breakdown elements shown in the Scoresheet
      • com.snc.pa.scorecards.maxbreakdownelements controls max elements in scorecard lists

      You can increase these limits by navigating to Performance Analytics > System > Properties and adjusting the values to accommodate your number of business applications.

    Practical Guidance for ServiceNow Customers

    • Follow the specified job execution order to ensure timely and accurate PA data collection and scoring.
    • Use Performance Analytics Premium if you need to analyze application performance data older than six months.
    • Align your fiscal period time zones with your score generation to maintain consistency.
    • Adjust system properties if you manage a large number of business applications to ensure complete visibility of application breakdowns in PA scorecards.
    • Be aware that daily frequency for PA indicators is deprecated in Yokohama; plan your data collection strategy accordingly.

    Use performance analytic (PA) indicators to know the count of incidents, problems, and changes logged against a business application and use this insight to improve the performance of your applications.

    Enterprise Architecture uses indicators that are sourced from Performance Analytics (PA). These indicators give a count of incidents, problems, changes, and the number of change requests that were closed on a given day. Follow the given order to run the PA jobs at the scheduled time, and get the scores of the indicators to evaluate the performance of your business applications.

    Order in which to run PA jobs and generate scores

    You should run the scheduled jobs in the following order:

    1. [PA Incident] Daily Data Collection.
    2. [PA Change] Daily Data Collection.
    3. [PA Problem] Daily Data Collection.
    4. [Enterprise Architecture Scheduled job] Load Application Indicators and compute Application Scores.

    If there are historic data, then run them in the following order:

    Note:

    You require Performance Analytics Premium for Enterprise Architecture (com.snc.pa.premium.apm) plugin to retrieve historic data that are older than six months.

    1. [PA Incident] Historic Data Collection.
    2. [PA Change] Historic Data Collection.
    3. [PA Problem] Historic Data Collection.
    4. Regenerate Enterprise Architecture scores for required time period. This action deletes the existing scores including daily scores and generates new scores instead of just updating the existing scores.

    Frequency at which indicator scores are generated

    Scores are generated as per the scheduled run of the job that executes the script. If the indicator frequency is:

    Monthly
    scores are generated only on the last day of a month.
    Quarter
    scores are generated only on the last day of a quarter.
    Yearly
    scores are generated only on the last day of a year.
    Note:
    Fiscal periods should be generated in the same time zone in which the scores are generated.

    Collection of PA indicator score data

    The period unit (days, weeks, or month) at which the PA indicator scores are collected and preserved depends on the frequency of the data source indicator. However, the frequency at which the application indicator collects the PA indicator data source scores varies.

    In Enterprise Architecture, the frequency of the application indicator must be greater than or equal to the frequency of the data source indicator.

    The following table describes the frequency at which Enterprise Architecture collects data from the data source indicators after the job runs:

    Table 1. APM data collection frequency
    Enterprise Architecture frequency Data source indicator frequency
    Monthly Monthly
    Quarterly Monthly and Quarterly
    Yearly Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly

    If you are an Enterprise Architecture customer, who has upgraded to the Yokohama release, then the Daily frequency of Performance Analytics data source indicator is not available. RemoveDailyFreqAndUpdatePAIndicator fix script automatically removes the Daily frequency of PA indicators and updates the frequency to Monthly.

    Limitations to display application breakdowns in PA scoresheet

    If there is a large number of business applications installed, then all the breakdowns are not displayed in the Performance Analytics > Scoresheet, as there is a limitation set in the system properties: com.snc.pa.scoresheet.max_elements and com.snc.pa.scorecards.max_breakdown_elements. To reconfigure the property limitation:

    1. Navigate to Performance Analytics > System > Properties.
    2. Enter the maximum number in the Maximum number of elements of a breakdown in Scoresheet field. The number must be greater than or equal to the number of business applications installed in your system.
      Figure 1. Performance Analytics Scoresheet
      Display of application breakdowns in Performance Analytics Scoresheet
    3. Enter the maximum number in the Maximum number of breakdown elements in scorecard lists field.
    4. Click Save.