Too many elements to display breakdown error in PA

[Abhijit4]

Hi All,

We have created indicator on Metric Instance to find out assets total In Stock/In Use duration. We have used breakdown on alm_hardware table with some filters, While preview it shows around 22k records. In system property breakdown maximum record count is set as 100000 which is greater that preview record count. Still we are seeing "Too many elements to display" message.

Breakdown definition:  we know that hardware sys_id will return too many records but we have used conditions to reduce it to around 20k record, we are basically adding hardware asset breakdown on metric instance table to find total In Stock/In Use duration for individual assets.

Does anyone has any input to resolve this issue?

@Adam Stout 

[Adam Stout · Accepted solution]

I believe you are just hitting a display limit, if you enter a few characters the values will show up.  The UI doesn't page (if I remember right) so showing 22k records (along with each individual series) would be a challenge.  You could use an element filter to refill a list (for My Assets or something like that).

[Bert_c1]

the sys_id field is unique across all records in the database, bad choice of fields to define a breakdown on. 

[Abhijit4]

Completely agree. But the requirement is to calculate total in stock/in use duration of individual assets. Even though sys is unique, same assets will have multiple entries in metric instance table. So adding breakdown on sys id to calculate individual assets total in stock duration is what we are doing.

[Bert_c1]

A simple list report on metric_instance, using the filter conditions of the indicator source and indicator will provide the same results, and work without error.  The Breakdown feature is meant to 'summarize' the count based on some field where multiple records have the same field value.  Such as task priority, or assignment group.  You will cause the score tables (pa_scores_l1 and pa_scores_l2) to grow and eventually cause performance problems.

Please review:

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/tokyo-now-intelligence/page/use/performance-analytics/concept/c_C...

You state "in stock/in use duration of individual assets". Maybe a breakdown on the 'install_status' ("State") or 'substate' ("Substate") field on alm_hardware will provide what you want.

[Abhijit4]

Thanks @Adam Stout and @Bert_c1 for  your help.

Including so many elements as part of breakdown is not good practice and might create issues later so we did small compromise with requirement and achieved it via normal report.