Organizations using ServiceNow depend on ServiceNow Development Services and ServiceNow Managed Services to enable automation, improve workflows, and achieve value. However, the effectiveness and strategic impact of your ServiceNow environment is ultimately assessed based on how well it is performing against clearly defined KPIs. Selecting and reviewing the right KPIs provides IT and business decision-makers with actionable insights while driving ongoing optimization and transformation of the platform.
ServiceNow empowers organizations to track and improve everything from system reliability and user satisfaction to compliance and operational efficiency. Once you understand how to identify and measure the right metrics, along with knowing what they mean in a managed services context, you can optimize data into value, ensure strategic alignment and enable a continuous improvement culture.
Key Categories of ServiceNow Managed Services KPIs
Performance and Availability KPIs
These metrics evaluate the important reliability of your ServiceNow instance. They measure system uptime, load times, infrastructure health, and utilization of resources. Reliable performance builds user trust and ensures the continued operation of digital businesses working within ServiceNow.
Service Delivery and User Experience KPIs
KPI measures in this category evaluate the delivered services quality to end users, including self-service utilization, ticket response time, end user customer satisfaction ratings, and first contact resolution rates. These metrics help point towards how effectively ServiceNow supports the operation of the business.
Incident and Problem Management KPIs
Ongoing incident management workflow and problem management KPI tracking enables organizations to measure the value of IT responsiveness, how quickly an incident is resolved, and how effective proactive support is working proactively. Retaining these important metrics are key to minimizing disruption to the business while improving service quality to end users.
Change and Release Management KPIS
Change and release processes are critical to the ongoing stability and effectiveness of the ServiceNow environment. KPIs like change success percentage, emergency change percentage, and the number of incidents related to changes, all demonstrate how well changes are being made within a safe, stable, and strategic methodology.
Financial and Operational Efficiency KPIs
These indicators help guide enterprises to how effectively ServiceNow is creating cost efficiencies and the proper allocation of resources to ensure operational output. As a collective with ServiceNow Consulting Services ensure that leadership understands KPI improvement or degradation will, or has not translated into a financial, process, or business outcome
Top KPIs for Monitoring ServiceNow Performance and Reliability
System Uptime and Availability Rate
This is an essential KPI for any cloud-based solution. A high availability rate, generally aimed at 99.9% or above, helps ensure that critical workflows stay ongoing and users are as productive as possible. Specially trained ServiceNow Managed Services teams use this KPI, consistently monitor, deploy redundancy measures, and automate failover processes to take service levels down to minute big incident response metrics.
Average Response Time and Page Load Speed
Response and load speeds are essential for user experience satisfaction. Tracking a customer’s application metrics of average response and page load speeds can highlight potential issues with supporting infrastructure ownership or configuration, but also identifies the prime potential bottlenecks in these workstreams that risk further frustrating users and ultimately slow down productivity in the business process. Driving optimization in your metrics is essential to the overall experience and making sure users are confident in using the platform.
Service Health Score and Infrastructure Stability
Particular service health scores will aggregate availability, integrations owning reliability, database health, and the normal functioning of the most important modules the platform provides. Infrastructure stability should therefore monitor the overall resiliency of the platform during the peak load in the use season, regulating upgrades, or having simply added integrations or content modules.
Capacity Utilization and Performance Degradation Trends
Capacity utilization monitoring reflects the resource capacity metrics to indicate over-or-under-activity in the ServiceNow environment, so we understand the need to scale-out the performance, or more commonly, reallocate the metrics of performance. Capacity Utilization will therefore monitor degradation performance trends over time by capacity and metrics of availability that are evidence of importance to measure when there is value in preventative maintenance of platform robotic resources.
Critical Incident Management KPIs to Track
Mean Time to Detect (MTTD)
MTTD indicates the average duration required for the system or support team to acknowledge an incident after it occurs. A lower MTTD shows a proactive, monitored environment that is important for stopping issues before they become significant events.
Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA)
MTTA measures the speed of formally acknowledging an incident that is detected by a support team. Quick acknowledgement is fundamental for efficient triage and accountability.
Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR)
MTTR is one of the most important KPIs for incident management, as it measures the average time taken to resolve incidents from the moment of detection until closure. A lower MTTR number indicates a mature incident response process, trained support team, and mature workflows.
First Contact Resolution (FCR) Rate
FCR is the percentage of incidents that are resolved on the first user contact with the support team without violating escalation or follow-up standards. High FCR rates indicate that users are being served quickly and efficiently and that channels for self service are effective.
Incidents Backlog and SLA Resolution Compliance
An increasing number of incidents or low Service Level Agreement compliance signifies either a process bottleneck, or shortfall in team resources. Keeping these factors at top of mind, will help managed service teams build their capacity planning for team resources, and work towards continual service improvement.
Change and Release Management KPIs for ServiceNow Stability
Change Success Rate
This key performance indicator (KPI) measures how many changes take place without generating incidents, outages, or rollbacks. The higher success rates support teams see within their change management will show either mature practices or evidence of effective risk assessment.
Change Failure and Rollback Rate
The percentage of changes that do not succeed or revert back to an earlier state in the system is the change failure rate. Managed services use this to improve pre-change testing and refine rollout plans to reduce errors.
Number of Emergency Changes
This tracks the number of times an unplanned, urgent, immediate change is made outside the normal change management process. Whenever there are fewer emergency changes, this is indicative of sound planning, governance, or ServiceNow being stable.
Average Time for Change Implementation
Average time for changes looks at the time taken from a change request through to delivery. This KPI reflects the overall efficiency of the change process and can show if the managed services are agile in adapting the ServiceNow platform to support business needs.
Change Associated Incident Percentage
This is simple, it represents the percentage of incidents that are directly related to a recent change or release and provides a balancing number to the change success rate. Managed services will look to this number to help identify the root cause and tighten testing protocols.
Security and Compliance KPIs for ServiceNow Environments
Security Incident Detection
These measures indicate how quickly a security issue – that is, any occurrence of a data breach, access control issue, or vulnerability – is identified and remediated. Managed service teams work to shorten the time of detection and remediation to keep data safe and the user trust level intact.
Patch and Update Compliance Rate
Patch compliance rates represent the degree to which the ServiceNow Environment is updated with security patches and new releases. High patch compliance means the system is protected from exploitable threats and operating at an effective capacity.
Audit Trail Accuracy and Data Integrity Metrics
Audit trails capture every modification made to the system and every action taken by users. The accuracy and completeness of audit trails are necessary for accountability, troubleshooting, and compliance audits. Additionally, agencies track incidents of data integrity, such as report errors or duplicate records, as a secondary KPI.
Regulatory Compliance Score
Organizations subject to regulatory requirements (GDPR, HIPAA, SOX) should demonstrate compliance with these regulatory requirements. This composite KPI measures the overall compliance status of the environment within the applicable frameworks and the effectiveness of the managed service team in governance, documenting, and monitoring.
Final Thoughts
While ServiceNow development Services may act as an enabler to digitally transformed service excellence with the aspiration of continual measurement, optimization, and strategic alignment through the ServiceNow Managed Services offering. Measuring KPIs across performance, incident management, change governance, user experience, security, and compliance provides actionable intelligence for ongoing improvement. When enterprises use the analytics framework of ServiceNow Consulting Services to develop business metrics, and subsequently use the offering of ServiceNow Managed Services to manage the continual relevance and performance of those KPIs over time, organizations are in a unique position to begin to realize the full value of their ServiceNow investment, which in turn promotes increased resiliency, scale, and competitive advantage in a digital-first market.
