Deepwatch protects ServiceNow data and business outcomes with OwnBackup Recover

Problems

To ensure great service delivery, Michael and the Deepwatch team were looking for ways to minimize the risk of data loss or corruption and recover more quickly than they could with existing approaches.

First, Deepwatch was looking for a faster and more efficient way to recover from accidental data loss.

“Probably monthly, we are tasked to restore a record that was incorrectly deleted. This eats up time and resources for the team.”

“We have one specific table that we use for customer ticketing because there's a lot of requests and data flowing through it. But that’s not our only one.”

“ServiceNow does not make it easy to find the records that were deleted. And if there was a mass delete, you have to search through a flat audit table and filter, making it painful to find a single, specific record.”

Keeping data in audit tables for restore purposes can be challenging, as these tables can get quite large over time as data is retained. Maintaining these tables can become a resource-intensive job for Michael’s team.

In addition, not all records are audited. If the data you need for a restore is in a table that doesn’t have auditing enabled, you won’t have the necessary data for restore.

Second, they needed to more effectively protect data from integrations than they could with ServiceNow’s native capabilities.

Deepwatch has ongoing development projects with systems that integrate into ServiceNow. Changes are made on a weekly basis to their software that integrates with ServiceNow to create tickets. Occasional errors with integrations might result in an entire column getting wiped out or overwritten with unusable data.

“That’s actually happened before. We’ve had an integration go awry, and the data was corrupted.”

With data coming in from live systems, going back to find the missing information to restore data can be tricky because the source system with the data may not be readily available.

“With ServiceNow alone, if we're lucky, we can rewrite whatever data was there before the integration. But if the original source material is gone, we either have to restore it from ServiceNow audit logs or try to recreate it.”

Solutions

Deepwatch was familiar with OwnBackup Recover because they had been using it for Salesforce. After experiencing its benefits for a few months, they realized it would be valuable for ServiceNow as well.

The first benefit was the ability to proactively monitor their ServiceNow instance for unusual data loss or corruption.

Because Michael is able to set alerts to be notified when tables have unusual volumes of changes, he can quickly investigate whether anything has gone wrong.

“We might not even know about the corruption without the ability to run a comparison on the data from a backup like we can in OwnBackup.”

And in the event there is a need to restore data, OwnBackup equips the DeepWatch team to do so quickly and precisely, thanks to easy to use restore capabilities.

“In ServiceNow it was all or nothing and we didn’t have the sophistication of comparing features that we can in OwnBackup. Now, we can compare backups and get that level of granularity we need to restore down to a specific group of records, saving us time in the long run.”

Beyond the ability to easily restore data, the Deepwatch team will gain further value from OwnBackup thanks to the ability to export ServiceNow data from the backups. The export capability will make it easier to populate analytic data stores to enable business insights.

“An export feature that makes it easy for us to push data to S3 and Snowflake—easier than setting up an integration in ServiceNow—got us really excited. We had just started using Snowflake here, so it lined up perfectly with our needs at the moment.”

The Deepwatch team also looks forward to the peace of mind that backups can provide during changes to their ServiceNow instance.

“We knew from our experience with OwnBackup Recover for Salesforce that we can run backups on-demand, before and after big projects. Knowing that this solution is also available for ServiceNow is a game changer.”

Now with OwnBackup, anytime Michael and his team make a change that could alter a table structure and rewrite records because of a new field, they run an on-demand backup of their data just before they make that change.

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