MID Server Capabilities & Dashboard Management
While working with MID Servers, understanding the capabilities and permissions becomes an important part. As an admin, it is ideal for you to know what you are allowed to do and how you can keep a check on the different aspects of MID Server capabilities.
Apart from this, MID Server status monitoring and health checks are also crucial steps at the server level and for the whole instance. In this topic, we are going to cover these two in detail.
What are MID Server Capabilities?
Capabilities define the functionalities that a MID Server can perform. Not every MID Server can do everything, so capabilities let us know what each MID Server is trusted to do within a defined IP address range.
Some of these capabilities are managed by the system automatically. For instance, the Nmap capability is used for credential-less discovery and is granted to the MID Server. You cannot remove or add it manually once it has been installed.
To manage and view capabilities on the MID Server, you must know MID Server configuration ServiceNow concepts:
- MID Server Clusters: Combine multiple MID Servers together for load balancing and failover. If one goes down, the work is redirected to the next cluster automatically.
- Domain Separation: In a multi-domain environment, MID Servers are restricted to access only records/credentials belonging to their own domain, as per credentials.
- Thread Management: The number of threads a MID Server can use can be tuned based on host hardware and everything else competing for resources.
What is a MID Server Dashboard?
Once a MID Server is installed, there is no separate local dashboard application on the host machine. The installation has only the MID Server application along with the “config.xml” file that runs in the background.
The status information and monitoring live on the ServiceNow instance, and not on the host. For MID Server status monitoring, there are certain fields involved, including:
| Field | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Status | Up / Down |
| Validated | Whether the connectivity/access validation has been completed |
| Version | The MID Server software build/patch version |
| Last refreshed | Last time the record’s data was updated |
| Started / Stopped | Timestamps for the service’s lifecycle |
| Unresolved issues | Count of open problems logged against this MID Server |
| Logged in user | The MID Server user account currently authenticating |
What should we look for?
In the MID Server Dashboard, the important things to monitor are:
- An increase in ready entries without matching the processing count can show that the MID Server is not picking up work fast enough.
- A constant increase in ready entries alongside declining or low processing rates can create a bottleneck.
- Look for individual or Group MID Servers with similar performance patterns. It helps in comparison.
Conclusion
Capabilities in ServiceNow MID Server determine which task runs as per the matching application, IP range and technical capability. In this topic, we have focused on how to create production-ready and monitored MID Servers.
By the end of this module, we have covered what MID Servers are, why they are important, and how we can create a record for them. It also covered the ways to download, configure, and validate the servers, along with status monitoring.
In the next and last module of the Admin curriculum, we will be focusing on the aspects of instance cloning in ServiceNow.
