General Ticketing Question

[tpritchett2]

Hello,

I am new to servicenow and am working on a dashboard that is supposed to basically display the work my team is doing in servicenow. I think the main idea is to track the "tickets" but I'm having trouble figuring out what tables to use from servicenow. What generally defines a ticket? Is it an incident, problem, change_request, and sc_req_item? Seems like task might be too granular. And if so, how come these tables are not all consistent in having the same columns? 

I want to create some sort of "executive" view so that we can basically see how we are doing but I'm not sure which tables exactly to get this information from and also what might be best to display from an executive pov. For example, I see these tables have "state" columns, but the values are just numbers that aren't very consistent across tables. And is the only table with SLA the incident table? How are you supposed to track how well you are doing on changes, problems, requests, etc.? 

[MohammadAtR]

Hi there,

Yes ticket can be incident, problem, change_request, and sc_req_item. While INC takes the highest order her due to ticking SLA but RITM have less urgency and Change have particular window.

For an executive view, I think you should consider creating report and using it in a dashboard.

[Dr Atul G- LNG]

Hi @tpritchett2 

https://youtu.be/UNnSPE2eP4s

This video will be helpful.

[LKSN]

First, Service Operations Workspace is what you are looking for. It shows your work and your teams work in a Dashboard, but with additional functionality. This is the easiest way to track tickets and you want to start looking at Workspaces as the place you do the work. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel if you can do it out of the box. There's also a variety of out of the box Dashboards if you really want to go that route, but SOW has it for you. 

What generally defines a ticket? 

A task. So you'd want to use the Task table so it would bring in all the tasks assigned to your group. 

And if so, how come these tables are not all consistent in having the same columns? 
Because everything is based on the base task table. So there's no reason to create the same field in each table. ServiceNow is just one big relational database and uses the concepts. Every task has a certain similarity, but then from there, they branch off and have their own specific fields. 

Things like sc_req_item are not a tasks. That's catalog item that has been requested, which lives inside a Request record (not task/ticket). So that would be even different. 

Any task table can have a specific SLA assigned to it. 

There's the Incident Management Dashboard that shows those kinds of tickets and that and SOW are part of how you track how you're doing. ServiceNow also has a variety of reports / analytics that are out of the box. 

Here's a decent article on analytics that are part of SN
https://www.servicenow.com/community/itsm-articles/itsm-platform-analytics-and-how-to-address-report...
State columns are based on numeric values for faster sorting/reporting. 

[SohamTipnis]

Hi @tpritchett2,

In ServiceNow, a “ticket” usually refers to task-based records like Incident, Problem, Change Request, and Request Item, since they all extend the Task table. For an executive dashboard, you can use the Task table (filter by sys_class_name) and the task_sla table to track volume, SLA performance, and overall health across all ticket types.

Also, you can refer to the below articles:

https://www.servicenow.com/docs/r/manufacturing/mco-general-form.html

https://www.servicenow.com/docs/r/it-business-management/financial-management/c_GeneralLedger.html

If you find my answer useful, please mark it as Helpful and Correct. ‌‌‌😊

Regards,
Soham Tipnis
ServiceNow Developer ||  Technical Consultant
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/sohamtipnis10