Exporting Data to Network Shares

[Kevin Meier]

I have a request from one my my business groups to be able to create Power BI reports on their data.  From everything I have read, the Power BI Connector only has the ability to connect to Incidents.  If I cannot get direct access to the tables in their scoped app, I need to export their data to flat files that they can consume.

I have been looking at System Export Sets however, one of the things I need to configure is the Export Target, which only allows me to export to a location on a MID Server.  This has raised the following questions:

1. Since the MID Server is a new concept to me, I can only summize that it is simply an Agent running on a server in our environment that communicates with our instances in the cloud...... I read up on this later.  If this is correct, I assume that I simply need to get our infrastructure group to create a share so the business can access the exported data files.  Hoping someone can confirm or correct my thought process on this.
2. The choices I have for MID Server in the Export Target don't match our instances or they were simply poorly named.  Should there be an Agent for each instance?
3. Since this type of request is likely going to come up again, are there any best practices someone can point me to around exporting data?  For example, do I architect this so that there is a folder under the Agent called Data Exports and then under that, I create separate folders for each business group with a share to each folders?  How do I handle exporting to different environments (i.e. Dev, Test, Prod)?
4. The process of exporting data is starting to sounds complicated simply because there is a potential for a need to include a number of other groups such as architecture, security, system admins, etc, which usually means red tape and a long time to get anything done. Is there a better/easier way to achieve my goal?

Thanks,

Kevin

[sachin_namjoshi]

I have achieved similar requirement for one of customers using ETL integration.

You can use data pump utility to export data from your intended tables to remote database instance.

You will have to run daily jobs ( to get delta data) to export data from service now to this remote external DB instance.

You will need mid server to provide connectivity between your instance and DB instance. These data pump jobs will run on mid server and they are pretty fast and resource optimized. 

You can find more details about datapump utility below.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/servicenowpump/

Regards,

Sachin

[Kevin Meier]

Thanks for the reply Sachin.  I think if I were to go down the ETL route, I would be forced to use Informatica as it is one of our corporate standards.  That would also force me to use a resource external to my team, which also makes the flow unsupportable by us.  I was actually thing about this myself, but as a last resort.

However, your solution has me thinking more about the web services since I think Power BI can directly consume web services.  This is something I need to explore a bit further.

Cheers!

Kevin