Wake up your Servicenow instance easily

Waking up your Servicenow instance can be a pain. Those of you, who are using a Servicenow Developer Platform know what I am talking about. You start your work in the morning, open your instance url just to see that your instance is hibernated and you need to wake it up first to get working.

This makes some of us nervous, takes a tremendous amount of time. You need to log in to the Servicenow Developer portal go to “Manage” then “Instances”, confirm that you want to wake up your instance etc. You can only request one developer instance at a time, so if you wan’t to have for example multiple versions of Servicenow at your disposal to test something, you need to register multiple times, this makes the process of awaking the instances even more time consuming. (The instances usually go hibernating after a few hours of inactivity)

For this reason, I’ve created an app, which does just this. You fill out a json config file with your credentials, start the app and it does all these things instead of you. No manual steps required.

The app is open source and it is running under the name “servicenow-instance-wakeup”, you can find it here. The app is written in Go and can be built for multiple platforms, it uses chrome dev protocol for navigating and manipulating the HTML source code and runs an instance of chrome (also in headless mode, which makes it easier to run it on servers) if you wan’t to build it yourself, feel free to download the source and build it. If you are not someone who cares or has the time to build the software themselves, there are pre-built binaries available for you to download and run at this url: here.

You may ask why would I use the app? Well, the app can be very useful for someone, who has one or more developer accounts and wan’t to quickly restore dev instances and start working/testing stuff. Also this app can be run in some kind of cron way, for example, we could run the app daily once/twice or whatever amount you would like to, and it would basically keep your instance awake and prevent hibernation as such. I would like to encourage everyone to use it wisely, the instances from the Developer Program are free of charge and shall not be abused.
These are only examples of usage, everyone should use it as they need it and let the instances expire after they do not need them. (See Disclaimer)

If you are running into some issue, while using the app or have some questions, ideas, new feature requests, please feel free to raise an issue with your concern on the issues tab.

Stay tuned for more software projects in the future :).

Disclaimer: I do not encourage anyone on abusing the free instances from Servicenow. It is up to the individual how he/she will use this software. The point of this app is to simplify the flow of awaking your instance from hibernation and not to run a farm of free instances and thus abusing the program.