Exploring Instance Scan

Release version: Yokohama

Updated January 30, 2025

3 minutes to read

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Summary of Exploring Instance Scan

Instance Scan is a tool designed to evaluate the health of your ServiceNow instance by running focused checks that identify security issues, upgrade best practices, manageability challenges, user experience, and performance vulnerabilities. It supports various scan types to analyze tables, records, or metadata, providing actionable insights to maintain and improve your instance.

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Note that Instance Scan has limited support for domain separation; findings are separated visually by the domain of the source record.

Key Features

Checks: Rules that detect anomalies or improvement opportunities in your instance. Checks can be created and grouped into suites.
Scan Types:
- Full Scan: Runs all active checks against the entire instance.
- Point Scan: Executes applicable checks against a specific record, update set, or application, targeting only relevant data.
- Test Scan: Allows testing of individual checks to verify their effectiveness before running broader scans.
Results and Findings: Scan results report the status and type of scan executed, while findings highlight specific records that violated check rules.
Dashboard: Provides a system-wide visual summary of instance health, allowing easy management and analysis of scan outcomes.
Quota Rule: Controls scan execution time to prevent long-running scans from impacting system performance by setting thresholds for scan duration.
User Roles: The scanuser role enables users to create checks, execute scans, schedule scans, monitor scan results, and analyze instance health.

Practical Benefits for ServiceNow Customers

Create and customize checks to continuously monitor and improve instance health.
Run targeted or comprehensive scans based on your operational needs, ensuring efficient use of resources.
Schedule scans to automate regular health assessments, keeping your instance compliant and optimized.
Monitor scan results through a centralized dashboard to quickly identify and address potential issues.
Leverage quota rules to maintain system stability by controlling scan execution times.

Next Steps

To effectively utilize Instance Scan, customers can explore configuration options, learn how to create and execute scans, and use the dashboard for ongoing monitoring. Detailed guides and references are available to assist with these tasks.

If you are new to Instance Scan, read this overview to learn what the tool can do. Follow the tutorial to create checks and execute scans that uses most basics of Instance Scan features.

Note:

Instance Scan doesn't fully support domain separation. Findings are visibly domain separated based on the domain of the source record. For more information see Domain separation.

Instance Scan overview

Instance Scan uses the following records, components and scan types.

Checks: Checks are singular focused rules that detect anomalies or opportunities in an instance. These checks can run against tables, records, or metadata. Checks are defined to identify security, upgrade best practices, manageability, user experience and performance vulnerabilities. See Getting started with checks for more information.
Results: An Instance Scan result reports the status and type of the scan. See Results for more information.
Findings: A finding is a reference to a record that has violated a rule from a check on the instance. See Findings for more information.
Dashboard: The Instance Scan dashboard is a system-wide visual representation of the health of your instance. The dashboard helps you manage and analyze the full scan results against your instance. See Instance Scan dashboard for more information.
Quota rule: A quota rule determines the execution threshold of a scan. The quota rule prevents the instance from running long scans. For example, any scan running longer than the threshold set by the quota rule will result in a failure. See Quota rules for more information.
Full scan: Execute a scan for the entire instance by selecting Execute Full Scan. Implementing a full scan runs all the active checks present in your instance.
Point scan: Execute all applicable checks against a single record, update set, or an application by selecting Run Point Scan. For example, if you execute a point scan against a business rule, only the checks that are applicable to the business rule table run, and only that single target record is scanned. If you execute an update set scan or an application scan, all records related to that update set or application are scanned. See Execute an app scan and Execute an update set scan for more information.
Test scan: Execute a test scan to verify if the check works as expected. The test scan enables you to test a single check instead of a full scan by selecting a single check and selecting Test Check on the Check form.

Instance Scan users

Instance Scan has the following roles.


Users	Description
scan_user	The scan_user role can run different types of scans and view the findings and results.

Instance Scan benefits


Benefit	Feature	Users
Create checks and check suites to know the health of your instance	Getting started with checks Create a check Create a check suite	scan_user
Execute scans on the created checks to review the instance health	Executing a scan	scan_user
Scheduling of scans and suite scan	Schedule a full scan Schedule a suite scan	scan_user
Monitor your scans to ensure no health issues of your instance	Monitoring a scan	scan_user
Manage and analyze the results of full scan against your instance	Instance Scan dashboard	scan_user

What to explore next

To learn more about using Instance Scan, see: