Due to the probabilistic nature of LLMs, you may see different responses from what’s listed below. Follow up with refined requests as needed while following these steps.
You’ll need: A Serval team with ServiceNow connected, and Manager or Builder permissions on that team.
What you’ll build
- A read-only investigation that pulls recent ServiceNow tickets and groups them by category.
- A Serval workflow that automates the most common request type Catalyst surfaces.
Step 1: Connect ServiceNow (if you haven’t already)
Open Catalyst from the side panel in Serval and ask: “Is ServiceNow connected to this team?” If it isn’t, Catalyst will surface a Connect card. Click through the integration flow and return to the chat. Catalyst will pick up where you left off.Step 2: Ask Catalyst to analyze your ticket history
In the chat, describe what you want to accomplish: “Pull the last 90 days of ServiceNow incidents for our team. Group them by category and show me the top 10 most common request types, with counts and example tickets.” Catalyst will:- Draft a temporary read-only investigation that queries ServiceNow’s incident table.
- Run it immediately (read-only investigations auto-approve).
- Return a summarized table directly in chat.
| Category | Count | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Password reset | 187 | INC0012345 |
| New laptop request | 94 | INC0012402 |
| VPN access | 71 | INC0012498 |
| … | … | … |
Step 3: Pick an automation candidate
Look at the results and pick the highest-volume request that’s also the most mechanical. In this example, password reset at 187 tickets in 90 days is the obvious starting point. Ask Catalyst: “Can you build a workflow that resets a user’s password in Okta and notifies them in Slack?” Catalyst will:- Check whether a password reset workflow already exists in the team
- Confirm which integrations to use (Okta for the reset, Slack for the DM)
- Draft the workflow and stage it in the resource side panel
Step 4: Test the workflow before publishing
You can run draft workflows immediately inside Catalyst before publishing. Catalyst may prompt you to do so, or you can click Run in the resource panel. We recommend testing the workflow against a dummy user account. To make adjustments to the workflow, describe the update in chat and Catalyst will edit the draft. “Update the Slack message to include a link to our password manager at passwords.example.com.”Step 5: Publish
When the draft workflow looks right, click Publish in the resource panel. Publishing exposes it to:- The help desk agent (so it can run on incoming requests from Slack, Teams, email, or web)
- External triggers (scheduled runs, events, webhooks, API calls)
Tips
- Start narrow. “Reset password in Okta” is a better first workflow than “handle all account problems.” Small, focused workflows are easier to test and reuse.
- Let Catalyst search first. Before building, Catalyst checks for existing workflows and the installable gallery.
- Access provisioning isn’t a workflow. If your analysis surfaces “grant access to X” requests, configure those in Settings → Access Management, not as a standalone workflow. Catalyst will guide you there.
What’s next
- Connect more sources (Jira, Zendesk, your existing knowledge base) so Catalyst can analyze across systems.
- Use Catalyst to build an analytics dashboard tracking how often each new workflow runs and how many tickets it deflects.
- Set up a background agent to re-run the analysis monthly and surface new automation candidates as your ticket mix shifts.
Related links
Catalyst overview
What Catalyst can do
Catalyst workspace
Get familiar with the Catalyst interface
Getting started
Enable Catalyst, open your first session, and publish a change
Changes and reviews
Stage changes, propose reviews, and configure approvers
Building workflows
Natural language prompting, manual edits, versioning
Dashboards
Building analytics dashboards with Catalyst