Overview
Platform analytics was released in Xanadu as the replacement for the standard Reporting used in ServiceNow. During the Yokohama and Zurich releases it has received multiple improvements, but many organisations still haven’t moved on. Let’s have a quick look at it to encourage you to start using it if you haven’t done it yet.
Dashboards and Data Visualizations
Same as we do with Performance Analytics or Reporting we need to create a Dashboard where reports will live. To do so, we need to go to “Platform Analytics” and click on “Analytics Center”.
Then we will see two sections:
- Dashboards
- Data Visualizations
Dashboards in Platform Analytics work the same as other dashboards but they can be “Certified” to demonstrate the company has approved them and are actually recommended. I will talk about this in another blog post, so for now let’s talk about creating a simple dashboard. Certified dashboards can be found under the "Certified" tab and they include a red label highlighting this fact.
Data Visualizations, however, are a new concept in standard reporting. They are similar to Indicator sources in Performance Analytics. Elements that can be reused and that already contained a subset of rows based on a criteria someone has previously entered.
The idea is that if we are always querying the database for a given condition, we can specify the condition once and have all reports following the same condition. If at some point the condition changed, instead of amending all reports, we could simply amend the Data Visualization once and all reports would be following such criteria.
Once this has been clarified, we should check how to create a new Dashboard and how they look like. All we need to do on the screenshot above is click on “Create new Dashboard”. That will show us a popup window to let us select if we want the “In-line editor” or the “Technical editor”. In this article we will explore the “In-line” one as it’s the recommended for most users. All you need to do at this point is enter a name and press “Create new dashboard”.
A new Dashboard is created following the same approach Performance Analytics Dashboards do. We can add new elements (reports) and use drag and drop features as usual. Let’s click on “Add new element” to start adding new stuff to our dashboard.
This button will offer us a series of elements we can add to our dashboard. In this example given it’s an introduction we will use “Heading” and “Data visualization”. Let’s click on “Data Visualization” and see what’s offered.
Configuring Visualizations
As mentioned before we can either create a “New Visualization” or reused a previously saved one. We click on “New Visualization” and see that we are offered a series of parameters.
The first parameter we can configure is the Visualization type. We see the same types of “reports” we used to have in standard Reporting. Let’s go with a “Single score”:
Imagine we want to track how many breached SLAs we are having today.
Then we can rely on previously predefined conditions such as “Breached SLAs” or “Achieved SLAs” which come OOB, but we could even create our own Predefined Conditions if we needed them.
In our example, we will be selecting Breached SLAs, but we also need to expand the condition to specify we don’t want all Breached SLAs, but the ones that were breached today. That’s why there’s a condition field under it to allow us to add up ad hoc conditions to the predefined ones.
Once this is done, we can go back to the properties of our Visualization and configure some other parts, such as the “Score Size”, “Score Icon”, “Icon Style” and the colours as shown below:
Alternatively, we could set up a conditional display based on rules. Such as showing the number in yellow if it’s under 10 breached SLAs and red above that, for instance.
If we didn’t set up the condition, we would be getting a result like this:
Bear in mind that Headers can be added too. We can add a Heading to specify we are creating Visualizations for “SLA Tracking”. Also, we can create a new visualization for the Breached SLAs themselves. In this case, the “Visualization Type” would be “List – Simple”, the taeble “Task.SLA” and the filter has the same condition as the Single score created before:
We can finally add a Donut visualization showing the percentage of SLAs which are breached vs the ones achieved. Given this is a non-operational instance most of the SLAs are breached, but in the ideal world this donut should show an almost 100% score for achieved SLAs.
To show the breached vs achieved SLAs in this donut we need to specify the Task SLA table under data sources and group by “Has breached” as shown on the right panel.
Remember that you can always add new tabs by clicking on “+Add a tab” to segregate Visualizations and that you need to save the Dashboard and click on “Exit editing mode” to see the result:
Feedback
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