Case Study: ServiceNow Cloud Observability achieves 4X deployment velocity with Cypress

How ServiceNow Cloud Observability Achieved 4X Deployment Velocity with Cypress

ServiceNow Cloud Observability (formerly Lightstep) provides distributed tracing and observability for complex services processing over 800TB of data daily. Facing a cumbersome 35-step QA process documented in Google Docs that took two hours per deployment and discouraged testing, the engineering team lacked confidence and velocity. To address this, ServiceNow adopted Cypress for end-to-end test automation to simplify and accelerate their QA workflow.

Using Cypress in CI/CD, ServiceNow automated the most tedious tests within two weeks and replaced the entire manual QA process within two months, adding PR checks, parallelization, and Slack notifications for team visibility. The Cypress implementation drove a 4X increase in deployment velocity, 90% adoption across engineering, ~820k automated tests per month, and an 80% reduction in test run times—reducing risk, lowering operational overhead, and enabling faster, more frequent deployments.

ServiceNow

Xin Zhang

Staff Software Engineer