ServiceNow – Speed Connection Test
Is your ServiceNow instance slow? Is it slow for you or just some users?
Not many ServiceNow Admins are aware of this handy feature.
But every ServiceNow instance has a speed connection test built into the environment.
There are a number of reasons why an environment could be running slowly. There could be firewall issues, you could have poorly performing scripts that are slowing up the client, or there could be data center related issues on ServiceNow’s end that are out of your hands.
This feature can be used to test the ServiceNow environment speed, directly from you computer.
If you’re instance is slow, consider checking the speed test and see what results you get. This can help you debug any performance related issues, before reaching out to Customer Support. If end users are reaching out about ServiceNow’s performance, consider giving Customer Support a call immediately.
This is a simple tool that is completely out of box that can help you quickly debug the speed. While this tool does not provide more information than the actual speed, it is a helpful first step in the debugging process of performance.
This feature is reserved for Admins, and is essentially just a UI Page that gets rendered when the URL is reached. We’d recommend not updating the OOB UI Page or any of the code related to it.
How To Test Your Instance Speed
To test the speed of your ServiceNow environment, simply go to the following URL.
Once you do, you’ll arrive at a screen that looks like the below image.
You can also easily put this into an easy to click on Module in ServiceNow.
You’d do that by making a new module and having the arguments be a URL value of /connection_test.do.
To iniate a speed test between the instance and your computer, simply click “Start Connection Test”.
When I ran the test a few times, the fastest speed I got was 979ms (per 170k). Which I felt was fairly fast as the environment is performing perfectly at this time.
If your numbers are a lot worse than this, you may have a slow environment.
When judging the speed between different environments, we would expect production to be the fastest. There is different and improved infrastructure and hardware that powers a ServiceNow Production instance, over a sub production environmnent. You could consider trying this test out between your different instances to see which one is the fastest.
The best thing to really do if your instance is slow is get in touch with ServiceNow Support.
They’re the best ones to be able to look more in depth at the instance to see what may be slowing it down.
When you run a speed connection test on your instance, what speed do you get?
Is it the same between your different ServiceNow environments?
Let us know below.
