--- sourceDocument: Australia Impact sourceDocumentLink: https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/r/impact Release : - australia ft:locale : - en-US ft:publication_title : - Australia Impact ft:clusterId : - ipact bundleId : - ipact --- # Use alerts to monitor your instance # Use alerts to monitor your instance {#ariaid-title1} * Release version: Australia * * Updated March 12, 2026 * * ![](https://www.servicenow.com/docs/portal-asset/ico-clock) 2 minutes to read Summarize ![AI sparkle icon](https://servicenow.com/docs/portal-asset/ai-sparkle-icon) Summarized using AI This content was generated using new OpenAI-powered functionality. Results are provided on an as is basis and are not guaranteed to be accurate or complete. ## Summary of Use Alerts to Monitor Your Instance ServiceNow Instance Observer offers a comprehensive alerting system to monitor your platform's health, performance, and user experience. These alerts are categorized to help you quickly identify and take action on issues affecting transactions, infrastructure, database health, email processing, job execution, user sessions, event queue management, messaging bus performance, data volume growth, application host health, and AI/ML-driven anomalies. Show full answer Show less ## Key Features * **Transaction Monitoring:** Detects anomalies like transaction volume drops or spikes, slow response times, and database query delays at both system-wide and node levels. * **Node and Infrastructure Health:** Alerts on CPU, memory usage, garbage collection delays, and load balancer container resource utilization to prevent bottlenecks or failures. * **Database Performance:** Monitors CPU usage on database hosts, replication lag, row locks, and abnormal growth of databases and tables to maintain data reliability. * **Email Processing:** Tracks delays or failures in inbound and outbound email flows to ensure timely communication. * **Scheduler and Job Execution:** Identifies stuck schedulers, long-running jobs, and abnormal thread activity to facilitate smooth job lifecycle management. * **User Sessions and Activity:** Provides insight into user login patterns across the instance and individual nodes for security and usage monitoring. * **Event Queue and Semaphore Management:** Monitors event backlog, semaphore wait times, and queue depths critical for debugging event handling and job throttling. * **Asynchronous Messaging Bus (AMB):** Observes outgoing message queue sizes and utilization for real-time application behavior insights. * **Data Volume Monitoring:** Flags excessive growth in history or list data that could degrade performance. * **Application Host Health:** Alerts on CPU overload at the application layer to maintain service responsiveness. * **AI/ML Intelligent Alerts:** Employs AI-driven anomaly detection to proactively identify unusual patterns affecting instance health. * **Key Alerts and Notifications:** Enables setting customized alert thresholds using historical data and configuring targeted notification recipients. ## Practical Application for ServiceNow Customers * **Manage Alerts Efficiently:** Directly act on threshold alerts from notifications to quickly resolve performance or health issues. * **Monitor Application Performance:** Set alerts to track average response times and receive proactive notifications about degradations. * **Use Popular and Guided Alerts:** Leverage pre-configured common alerts for quick setup and notifications tailored to instance performance monitoring. * **Customize Long Pending Jobs Alerts:** Configure notifications based on job priority to manage groups of pending jobs efficiently. * **Integrate with ServiceNow and Third-Party Systems:** Route Instance Observer alert notifications to ServiceNow instances, external systems, or via email/SMS for unified monitoring. * **Custom Payloads for Integrations:** Define and manage JSON payloads for alert integrations to tailor notifications to your operational workflows. ## Expected Outcomes By utilizing Instance Observer alerts, ServiceNow customers can maintain optimal platform health, quickly detect and respond to performance anomalies, ensure timely communication processing, and streamline job and user activity monitoring. The integration capabilities and AI-driven insights empower teams to proactively manage their instances, reduce downtime, and enhance overall user experience. ServiceNow Instance Observer provides a comprehensive set of alerts designed to monitor platform health, performance, and user experience. These alerts are categorized for easy consumption and actionability. Transactions : Monitors application transactions for anomalies, spikes, or degradations in performance such as: * Transaction Decrease: Detects a drop in total transaction volume * Transaction Decrease Node: Identifies transaction volume drop per node * Transaction Increase: Flags unexpected transaction surges * Transaction Increase Node: Highlights node-level transaction spikes * Response Time: Triggers when system-wide response time increases * Response Time Node: Flags nodes with degraded response times * Database Response Time: Monitors database-level latency impacting transactions * Slow Queries Per Second: Identifies the volume of slow database queries affecting responsiveness {#io-alerts-intro__ul_cnz_ghz_bgc} Node health (CPU, memory, or garbage collection) : Tracks node infrastructure health to avoid bottlenecks or failures: * Node CPU time: High CPU usage alert for a node * Node memory: Monitors memory consumption patterns * Node garbage collection time: Tracks JVM GC delays * Load balancer container CPU utilization: Flags CPU overload on LB containers * Load balancer container memory utilization: Detects memory exhaustion on LB containers {#io-alerts-intro__ul_rhd_t3z_bgc} Database performance and health : Covers critical database indicators to verify query health and data reliability: * Database host health CPU: High CPU on primary DB host * Shards host health CPU: Resource issues on shard hosts * Read replica host health (CPU): Read-replica CPU anomalies * Standby replication lag: Lag in standby DB replication * InnoDB row lock: Frequency of row lock waits * Primary database growth: Flags abnormal growth in primary DB * Database table growth: Specific table-level growth indicators {#io-alerts-intro__ul_yyz_hjz_bgc} Inbound and outbound email : Promotes timely delivery and ingestion of email-based communications: * Outbound email: Delays or failures in outbound email processing * Inbound email: Issues in ingesting incoming emails {#io-alerts-intro__ul_fpb_glz_bgc} Scheduler and job execution : Helps detect issues in the job execution life cycle: * Scheduler stuck: Scheduler not progressing or blocked * Long-running jobs: Jobs exceeding typical run time * Specific long-running jobs: Custom job monitoring * Thread running: Threads running unusually long or in high volume {#io-alerts-intro__ul_pkv_5lz_bgc} Session and user activity : Tracks user login behavior across instance and nodes: * User session logged in -- Instance: Log in activity across instance * User session logged in -- Node: Node-wise session metrics {#io-alerts-intro__ul_rn2_2mz_bgc} Event queue and semaphore management : Critical for debugging platform event handling and job execution throttling: * Default semaphore mean: Semaphore wait time trends * Default semaphore QDepth: Depth of queued semaphore requests * Integrated semaphore: Monitors integrated semaphore contention * Event queue check: Tracks backlog in event queues * Specific queue for events: Custom event queue monitoring * High priority event queue: Monitors mission-critical event queues * ECC queue: External communication channel backlog alerts {#io-alerts-intro__ul_xwz_lmz_bgc} Asynchronous Messaging Bus (AMB) : Internal messaging bus observability for real-time app behavior: * AMB send queue depth: Size of outgoing message queue * AMB send in use: Utilization of AMB sending capacity {#io-alerts-intro__ul_jf4_pnz_bgc} Historical or list data volume : Monitors growth of historical or list data that can impact performance:History list length: Flags excessive record count in history tables. Application host health : Monitors health at the application layer:Application host health CPU: Application-tier CPU overload alerts. AI/ML or intelligent alerting : Includes alerts generated via AI/ML-based behavior analysis:Auriga Intelligent: AI-driven anomaly or pattern detection alerts. * **[Key alerts and notifications](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/YAqEA5lkL3gpi18YTClx~g)** Use the Instance Observer Key Alerts functionality for flexibility to set alerts with historical thresholds from four week increments specific to your business needs and configure who on your team receives notifications. * **[Manage Instance Observer alerts](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/08PjQD6s31tk~upqdfwtnw)** Act on Instance Observer (IO) threshold alerts directly from the notification. * **[Monitor the average response time of applications](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/deBu9wJJkxeVEbwGZVk7lQ)** Set an alert to monitor the application performance when the average response time of applications that run on an instance exceeds the configured threshold. * **[Use common alerts to track performance (Guided users)](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/Ji3FHBDqtM4NrFd5Y6MTJg)** Use the Instance Observer alerting feature to receive notifications on the performance of your instance. Monitor the alerts that are system driven. * **[Use popular alerts for notifications (Advanced and Total users)](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/WiDOPI8Svxb8W_9cAexQ7Q)** Get started with the popular alerts that are most widely used to receive notifications about your instance performance if you're new to the Instance Observer (IO) alerting system. The most popular alerts appear on the first page of your Configure Alerts page. * **[Instance Observer alert notifications](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/gN9IQKqo8H1LX2sTx3MXjQ)** Notifications for alerts and other system activity are displayed on the Instance Observer banner. * **[Configure long pending jobs alert](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/9YjZllR_OjZXHeFbihDXdg)** Get notifications when jobs that are pending exceed your defined overdue thresholds by configuring the Long Pending Jobs alert. Set up conditions by job priority to take action on groups of jobs---such as all discovery jobs or system cleanup jobs---in one go, rather than managing them individually. * **[Configure alert notifications for an instance](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/FQOaozxE5Zt6eecFkTWY3g)** Set up a basic integration between Instance Observer (IO) and ServiceNow to route IO alert notifications to a ServiceNow instance. * **[Configure alert notifications for a third-party application](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/2YjSle2MkkkA7Ty9tXb4CA)** Set up a basic integration between Instance Observer (IO) and third-party integrations to route IO alert notifications to an external system in addition to emails and SMS. * **[Custom payload in alerts integration](https://servicenow-prod.fluidtopics.net/vOPiOA_WE_X4obxaVYZbdg)** Instance Observer integrations enable you to define and manage custom JSON request payload for ServiceNow and third-party integrations.