User Experience

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated July 31, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of User Experience in Instance Observer (Yokohama Release)

    The User Experience feature in Instance Observer provides real-time monitoring and analysis of user interactions and application performance. Designed for Impact Total customers, it delivers detailed telemetry at the node, transaction type, URL, and user levels to help identify and resolve performance issues quickly.

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    This functionality enables ServiceNow customers to visualize user experience problems, including outages, service degradations, and transaction response time increases, through an intuitive dashboard.

    Key Features

    • Transaction and User Metrics: Displays current transaction counts, response times, unique user counts, and max response times with trend graphs to track performance changes over time.
    • User Activity Visualization: Shows the top 100 most active users with anonymized IDs. Color-coded blocks indicate whether users exceed transaction volume thresholds, helping to pinpoint impacted users during incidents.
    • Node Performance Monitoring: Presents response times per node with visual indicators for average versus elevated response times, allowing quick identification of problematic nodes.
    • Application Performance Tracking: Measures key metrics such as total transaction processing time, semaphore wait time, UI response time, network latency, and content download time to monitor application health.
    • Interactive Data Exploration: Users can drill down into graphs for node transaction counts and response times to investigate specific incidents or trends further.
    • Search and Analysis: Allows searching for specific URLs causing slowdowns and analyzing transaction types and nodes for outliers and trends.

    Key Outcomes

    • Gain clear visibility into which users and URLs are affected by performance issues or outages.
    • Identify and address service degradations proactively by monitoring transaction volumes and response times.
    • Optimize application performance by tracking detailed timing metrics and node-level data.
    • Support data privacy with anonymized user IDs, with an option for administrators to enable non-anonymized data collection if needed.

    Important Considerations

    User Experience in Instance Observer is not available to customers in certain restricted environments, including FedRAMP, NSC DOD IL5, Australia IRAP-Protected datacenters, self-hosted customers, or managed service providers.

    Explore real-time user monitoring to analyze user experience and performance insights in Instance Observer​ telemetry into node, transaction type, URL, and user level breakdowns for Impact Total customers.

    • Access the User Experience to visualize quickly your user base issues based on transaction type and volume, outage or service degradations, and access the specific affected URL​ for Impact Total customers.
    • Search for a specific URL that is causing increases in transaction response time.​
    • Analyze node and transaction type level data for outliers and trending​ transactions.
    • Identify which users are impacted by an outage or service degradation.​
    • Quickly visualize your user base based on transaction volume.​
    • Monitor your applications for performance issues and track the cause of performance issues.

    The overview page breaks down user history and transaction count into various widgets and charts into a dashboard view.

    Overview page with populated chart data for the selected instance and timeframe.

    Table 1. User Experience overview
    Data type Description
    • Transaction count
    • Transaction response time
    • Unique user count
    • Max response time
    		 Displays the current value, a percentage of decrease or increase in historical trend, and a visual graph of the activity.
    Top 100 most active users
    • Hover on a user block to see an encrypted user ID and the number of transaction reports for that time period.
      • Green blocks represent users without a threshold warning
      • Red blocks indicate a transaction volume that surpasses the general threshold.
    • Select a user block to view the details of the entry.
    Note:
    The user ID is anonymized. Administrators have the capability to opt-in to the collection of non-anonymized data.
    Node performance by response time
    • Hover on a tile to see the node name and the response time for that node.
      • Green blocks represent nodes with average response times.
      • Red blocks indicate increased response time outside of average parameters for the node.
    • Select a node block to view the details of the entry.
    Application performance by response time Track applications that have performance issues by using the average response time metric.
    The metrics are:
    • Total transaction processing time
    • Total semaphore wait time
    • Total UI time (Average response time)
    • Network latency
    • Content download time

    For more information, see Track the response time of applications to monitor their performance.
    Node transaction count Select a point on the graph to view additional actions and drill into the transaction details.
    Node response time Select a point on the graph to view additional actions and drill into the transaction details.
    Note:
    User Experience in Instance Observer may not be available to customers in the FedRAMP, NSC DOD IL5, or Australia IRAP-Protected datacenters, to self-hosted customers, or in other restricted environments, or to managed service providers.