The Silence of the Notifications

Well brave reader, if you are still here, and if you are reading this I assume you are…otherwise this is just my weird internal monologue…

I haven't scared you off yet with my October, scary movie themed posts…although that opening sentence may have done the trick…

But if you are still here after those first two sentences…I promise…it's about to get marginally better!

Anthony Hopkins is probably my favorite actor. He played some pretty iconic roles. But perhaps his most famous was the enigmatic, charismatic, and terrifyingly intelligent, Hannibal Lecter. 
For the role, he won his first Oscar for Best Actor in a Leading Role with just over 16 minutes of screen time! Wow!

What made Hannibal truly chilling wasn’t just his words — it was the silence. That unnerving calm before the chaos. The kind of quiet that signals something’s gone terribly wrong… you just don’t know where yet.

In the world of ServiceNow, a similar silence can creep in. Notifications stop. Alerts go quiet. Incidents that should have been raised never make a sound. For a moment, it feels peaceful — until the realization hits: your system isn’t silent because everything’s fine… it’s silent because it’s no longer speaking to you.

Initially, the quiet feels like relief. No pings. No emails. No alerts. After weeks of nonstop noise, your ServiceNow instance is finally… silent.

But remember Hannibal Lecter — calm on the surface, terrifying underneath.

In The Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling learns that silence often conceals something horrific. The same applies to your instance. When notifications stop, it’s rarely a sign that all is well — it’s a sign that something’s broken, and your system is quietly unraveling.

A misfired business rule, a disconnected email account, a disabled integration — any of these can lead to the same chilling outcome: users screaming into the void while you hear nothing.

Best Practices:
🔕 Run regular notification and integration health checks.
🔕 Monitor email logs for delivery failures or spikes in silence.
🔕 Set up dashboards that alert you when things get too quiet.

Because silence isn’t golden in ServiceNow — it’s a warning. And the worst incidents are the ones you don’t hear coming.

Like Clarice, listen carefully. Follow the faint clues: missing updates, vanishing acknowledgments, or that one user who insists, “I never got the email.”

It's quiet in here…yeah…a little too quiet:
Your ServiceNow instance may look like that happy, peaceful family at the beginning of a scary movie — but we all know that set up…Run a quick check before that peaceful silence turns into a full-blown horror sequel. Because in IT, “no news” isn’t always good news… sometimes it’s a broken notification.