The Data Quality Monitor application is built for ServiceNow platform owners, product owners, ITSM / SPM leaders, and enterprise architects who need a structured way to detect, track, and remediate data quality issues across the platform.
ServiceNow implementations often suffer from:
- Incomplete or inconsistent records
- Orphaned or stale tasks and demands
- Misaligned values across key tables (e.g. Incident, Problem, Change, Demand)
- Data that breaks reporting, SLAs, or governance rules
Data Quality Monitor addresses these challenges by providing out-of-the-box data quality controls for 40+ common patterns, an end-to-end issue lifecycle, and real-time notifications – all built natively on ServiceNow and extended via Flow Designer without custom code. New monitors can also be implemented for other domains / tables via self-service
Key benefits include:
- Fewer “bad” records flowing into reports and dashboards
- Improved MTTR – not only for incidents, but for data defects that cause downstream issues
- Reduced manual checks and spreadsheets for data validation
- Better governance and auditability for platform and process owners
The application leverages standard ServiceNow concepts (tables, records, assignments, flows, notifications, dashboards) so it behaves like a natural extension of the platform rather than a separate monitoring tool.
1. Data Quality Dashboard
A central dashboard for data stewards, platform owners, and process owners to see:
- Open data quality issues by table / process (e.g. Incident, Change, Demand, etc.)
- Issues by age (active data quality issues)
- Top data quality patterns causing the most noise
- Total data quality issue counts (active data quality issues)
2. Data Quality Issue Record
A dedicated record type to track each detected data quality issue, including:
- Impacted table and record (e.g. Incident, Change, Demand, etc.)
- Data quality rule that triggered the issue
- Assigned group / owner
- Status and lifecycle (e.g. On Hold, In Progress, Resolved)
- Audit history of all actions (updates, reassignments, comments)
This provides a task-like experience for managing data defects with full traceability for audits and compliance.
3. Preconfigured Data Quality Rules Library
An extendable library of 40+ predefined data quality controls, for example:
- Records missing critical fields (e.g. priority, assignment group, service, CI)
- Inconsistent values across related records (e.g. misaligned priorities or categories)
- Stale records (e.g. no updates for X days)
- Orphaned records (e.g. related items deleted or status mismatches)
Rules are delivered as no-code, configurable patterns and can be extended or cloned using Flow Designer and standard configuration, without scripting.
4. Automated Detection & Lifecycle Handling
Data quality issues can be detected via:
- Scheduled executions (e.g. regular checks across core tables)
- Manual executions (e.g. triggered by user)
Once detected, issues are automatically:
- Created as Data Quality Issue records
- Classified (severity, rule type, impacted area)
- Assigned to the right team / user based on configurable logic
- Progressed through the lifecycle based on actions and validations
This ensures consistent handling of data problems instead of ad hoc email or spreadsheet-based follow-up.
5. Notifications & Collaboration
The application uses standard ServiceNow notifications and activity streams:
- Daily and weekly emails are sent for assigned active data quality issues.
This keeps the right people informed while staying within ServiceNow’s standard UX.
6. Governance & Audit Trail
Every data quality issue maintains a complete audit trail:
- When and how it was detected
- Who owned and worked on the issue
- What decisions were made (e.g. fixed, accepted, or rejected)
This supports governance, risk, and compliance reporting and makes platform decisions transparent for internal and external auditors.
7. Application Modules (Navigation)
Typical modules under the application menu include:
- Issue Dashboard
- All Issues
- My Issues
- Issue Rules
These can be adapted to match your internal naming conventions and role structure.
Initial release
To enable detection subflows related to ITSM, the ServiceNow Core application must be activated on the instance.
Similarly, to utilize detection subflows for SPM, the Project Portfolio Suite application must be active on the instance.