Managing custom apps using AEMC

  • Release version: Yokohama
  • Updated January 30, 2025
  • 4 minutes to read
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    Summary of Managing custom apps using AEMC

    The App Engine Management Center (AEMC) enables ServiceNow customers to review metrics and manage custom applications throughout their development lifecycle. It provides insights into app development and production environments, detailed usage data, subscription monitoring, deployment history, and collaborator management to help optimize app performance, compliance, and maintenance.

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    Key Features

    • Custom App Metrics and Lifecycle Status: The AEMC Overview and Custom apps pages display high-level and detailed metrics, including app counts in development and production, trending data over 90 days, and filtering options for app types and statuses.
    • Application Details and Navigation: Each app is listed individually with publishing status, usage data, subscription details, deployment history, and collaborator information. Apps can be opened directly in App Engine Studio for deeper inspection.
    • App Usage Monitoring: The App usage tab provides aggregated monthly data—user count, record inserts, and updates—helping to determine app adoption, identify issues, and assess load balancing needs.
    • Subscription Monitoring: Displays active roles, user assignments, and license implications. This helps administrators understand license costs, manage permissions, and identify role inheritance to ensure compliance. The visibility of this tab depends on the app's subscription mapping.
    • Deployment History: Tracks all app deployments, enabling quick identification of deployment timelines, approvals, and changes to facilitate troubleshooting and version control.
    • Collaborator Management: Lists all app collaborators on the development instance with their permissions, allowing rapid identification of who can make changes for prompt issue resolution.

    Key Outcomes

    • Gain comprehensive visibility into the status, usage, and health of custom applications to drive informed decisions about updates or retirements.
    • Manage licensing and user roles effectively to optimize subscription costs and maintain security compliance.
    • Track deployment history for efficient troubleshooting and governance of app versions and approvals.
    • Identify and coordinate with collaborators quickly to expedite fixes and enhancements.
    • Enhance operational efficiency by leveraging detailed analytics and monitoring within AEMC to support app lifecycle management.

    Review custom app metrics and manage apps through the development life cycle using the App Engine Management Center (AEMC).

    The App Engine adoption metrics section of the AEMC Overview page shows how many apps you have in development and production environments. Access more information by selecting the large number on each Custom apps card.

    The Custom apps page in AEMC shows more detailed metrics and a full list of your applications. In each tile in the Custom app lifecycle status section, you can see trending data for the last 90 days. You can show all apps in the Custom apps list or limit the list to only certain types of applications using the filter. Select a trend chart to filter the list to those criteria.

    Custom app page, with high-level metrics and list of all apps

    The Custom app page also lists all the applications individually, with a single record for each application. If the app has been published to production, the Published Version column shows the version number. If the Published Version column is blank, the app exists in development but has never been published to production.

    List of all custom apps

    View the app's usage data, subscription monitoring details, deployment history, and collaborators, if any, by selecting an application name from the list.

    Details on an application's record page.

    Select Open in App Engine Studio to see the contents of the app and access more information. The App Engine Studio application opens in a new browser window.

    App usage

    See a high-level view of the usage data for apps on production instances by selecting the App usage tab. The data includes the user count, insert count, and update count aggregated for the current month.
    • User count: The number of users who have accessed the application.
    • Insert count: The number of new records on tables in the application.
    • Update count: The number of records in the application that have been updated.
    Knowing usage data for your applications has several benefits:
    • Discover whether your app is being used. Are people using the app? Are they creating records? If not, consider updating or deleting the app.
    • Investigate and fix problems with the app. Knowing when or how data was changed can help identify where something went wrong.
    • Determine whether you must load balance the processing power of your instance by seeing when there might be consistently higher traffic in your app.

    In the User Experience Analytics dashboards section, see detailed data such as active users, sessions, and page views by selecting an experience. For more information about how to understand and use this data, see User Experience Analytics.

    Subscription monitoring

    Understand the roles used in your custom application and their implications for licensing and subscriptions. The data in this section includes details about each role and the users assigned to each role.

    Knowing subscription and licensing data information for each of your applications has several benefits:
    • Discover what roles are active in your custom application.
    • Discover which users are assigned each role and the permission levels they have.
    • See the cost implications of each license type and where it's used in your apps.
    System administrators can see which subscription the app is mapped to and have an option to change the subscription. Several factors affect what you see in this section.
    • If the app is mapped to an App Engine subscription, the Subscription Monitoring tab is visible.
    • If the app is mapped to a different subscription such as ITSM, the Subscription Monitoring tab is not visible.
    • If the app is mapped to App Engine, is switched to another subscription, and then is changed back to App Engine, the Subscription Monitoring tab is visible again.

    App Engine admins do not have permissions to change subscriptions. However, if an app is in the production environment, and there is a Subscription Monitoring tab, the App Engine admin can infer that the app is mapped to an App Engine subscription. If the Subscription Monitoring tab is not there, that app isn't mapped to App Engine.

    You can select a user's name in the Assigned Users section to see a role inheritance map. This map shows how this user inherited the role, whether from a parent role, a group assignment, or another inheritance. This information can help you take action if someone has a role you believe they shouldn't, and you want to change it.
    Figure 1. Role inheritance map
    Role inheritance map, showing how a user got their roles

    App deployments

    View the list of deployments your app has gone through on the Deployment history tab.

    Knowing deployment history information has several benefits:
    • If an app is deployed to production and there’s a defect, you can quickly see when the app was deployed and track down the problem.
    • If an app is deployed multiple times, you can quickly track what's changed over multiple deployments.
    • If an app is deployed to production, you can quickly see who approved the app deployment.

    App collaborators

    View the collaborators for the app by selecting the Collaborators tab. All collaborators are stored on the Development instance.

    If you must take quick action in the application to fix an issue or defect, you can quickly see who has permissions to make changes in an app and what those permissions are.