Instances

Telling your instances apart at a glance, marking one production, choosing where a deploy goes, and moving to a faster node.

The settings page has an Instances section. It lists every instance this browser knows about, from three places: the ones you have visited, your alignment targets, and your stored credentials. Search and sort sit above the list. Pick an instance to edit it, or edit the default that every instance starts from.

A Key pill on a row means a credential for that host is stored in the vault. The list only learns the host, never the username or the secret.

What you set here belongs to this browser. It is not synced.

The tag and the favicon

Instance tag is the strip that names the instance on every page of it. By default its text and colours come from the host name. You can replace the text, give it the favicon's colours, hide it, or drag it anywhere on the page and have it stay there. Reset position puts it back at the top centre. /itt turns it on and off from the palette.

Custom favicon replaces the tab icon the instance gets from its host name, so a row of browser tabs says which one is production. Right-click a colour swatch to go back to the derived colour.

A change made in one tab reaches the others at once, without a reload.

Production

Production makes every Update and Insert on that instance wait for you to confirm. It is off until you switch it on. How that guard decides what counts as a save is in update sets.

Deploy targets

Deploy target puts the instance on the list that Deploy to Test sends the active update set to. Several can be on, and a deploy visits them one after another. Switching on both Production and Deploy target for one instance asks first. The deploy itself is described in update sets.

Node switching

A ServiceNow instance runs on several nodes behind a load balancer, and one of them can be slow while the others are fine. The extension times the requests the page already makes, per node, and when yours is clearly slower than another one it says so in a notice at the bottom right.

Nothing is advised below 400 ms, a candidate has to be at least 35% faster, and it needs five samples before it knows anything about a node. After a switch it stays quiet for fifteen minutes, and Not now silences it for two hours.

Node switching, under Appearance in the settings page and in the toolbar popup, has three modes. Like the rest of Appearance it belongs to this browser, not to your account:

/node opens the full list: every node, its latency, where it is, and which one is serving you now. A node the extension has already been routed to can be switched to directly. For one it has not, the button is Search: it drops the balancer's cookie and lets it assign a node again, which may not be the one you wanted, and the label says so rather than promising. The header says how many of the nodes are reachable.