Refresh impacted services properties

Release version: Yokohama

Updated January 30, 2025

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Summary of Refresh impacted services properties

The refresh impacted services properties allow you to enable or disable the refresh impacted services capability in ServiceNow and configure specific criteria that control how impacted services are identified and updated during change management. These settings help you manage the relationships between configuration items (CIs) and impacted services efficiently, ensuring accurate impact analysis and related list population on change requests.

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Key Features

Include Affected CIs: You can configure whether to check all CIs listed in the Affected CIs related list or just the primary CI on the change form. Enabling this uses the svcciassoc table for faster and more concise service mapping, which is required if dynamic CI groups are used.
Impact Conflict Checking: When enabled, conflicts identified on change requests are cross-checked against service mappings and business services to detect directly impacted services.
Background Processing: The refresh process can run as a background event, allowing notification upon completion, or run in the user’s session without notifications.
Automatic Population of Related Lists: Service Offerings and Business Applications related lists on the change request form can be automatically populated from Impacted Services or CIs, improving visibility of affected service components.
User Notifications: Optional messages can be displayed on the change request form to indicate when the refresh impacted services process has been initiated.

Practical Use for ServiceNow Customers

By configuring these properties, you can tailor how ServiceNow identifies and updates impacted services during changes. This enables faster and more accurate impact analysis, better visibility of service dependencies, and improved change risk assessment. The ability to run refresh processes asynchronously with notifications helps maintain user productivity, while automatic updating of related lists ensures relevant service and application information is readily available. Understanding and adjusting these properties is essential to align the impacted services refresh behavior with your organization’s change management practices and CMDB structure.

Use the refresh impacted services properties to enable or disable the refresh impacted services capability, and to configure the criteria for additional refresh impacted services properties.

By configuring these properties, you can control the capabilities, such as:

Include the primary configuration item or all the items in the Affected CIs related list.
Processing of refreshing the impacted services as an event.
Populate Service Offerings and Business Applications from the Impacted Services related list.

The following properties can be found in sys_properties.list and on the Change properties page.

Table 1. Refresh impacted services properties
Property	Description
com.snc.change_request.refresh_impacted.include_affected_cis	When true, all the configuration items listed in the Affected CIs related list are checked. These configuration items are checked against the Application services mapping table (svc_ci_assoc) as this is a faster process, and also returns a more concise relationship picture. All the services from svc_ci_assoc table are retrieved. If the property is false, only the CI on the change form is used. This uses the method of traversing the cmdb tree structure to find the services. The services are retrieved from CIUtils script include. Note: If dynamic CI groups are used on the Change form, then this property must be set to true as the associations are located in the svc_ci_assoc table. When a business service is converted to an application service (as an example), all the levels included in the svc_ci_assoc table are considered at the time of conversion.
change.conflict.populateimpactedcis	If this property is set to true, then the ChangeCollisionHelper script include checks the configuration items that have been identified in the list of conflicts against the Application services mapping table (svc_ci_assoc) and also table (cmdb_ci_service) to check if there are any business services that are directly impacted.
com.snc.change_request.refresh_impacted.event	When true, the process of refreshing the impacted services is done through an event. This process is run in the background and you will be notified through a message in Notify that the process has been complete. When false, this is run in your session. As this is not run in background, there is no notification on completion.
com.snc.change_request.populate_service_offering	When true, the Service Offerings related list is populated from the Impacted Services/CIs related list. When false, the related list is not populated or amended in any way.
com.snc.change_request.populate_business_application	When true, the Business Applications related list is populated from the Impacted Services/CIs related list. When false, the related list is not populated or amended.
com.snc.change_request.refresh_impacted_services.message.show	When true, the `Refresh impacted services is initiated` message appears on the Change request form. When false, the `Refresh impacted services is initiated` message doesn't appear.