With our Zurich release, we are super excited to bring support for a new type of monitoring use case to Service Observability. Replicate your favorite charts from third party APM and Cloud providers, right inside of ITOM, no data ingestion required.
In this blog I’ll explain why we built this functionality, and give you step-by-step instructions for how to bring charts over to ITOM, using New Relic as an example. And just so you know, you can copy/paste charts from any of the tools we have integrations with, not just New Relic! Keep an eye on our docs, since we add new integrations all the time.
If you want us to publish more blogs with examples from other providers, leave a comment below!
Why bring charts from other tools into ITOM?
We built Service Observability to be the best, first place to look when you’re trying to understand what is going on with a service or its supporting infrastructure. This is particularly useful during activities like incident response or alert investigation, since you can jump right from an alert, a service map, or a past incident, into context that explains behavior, and gives you historical context. Of course, this all requires both data and a way to visualize it, which is the magic behind Service Observability.
As we build out integrations with third party APM and Cloud providers, we’re creating out-of-the-box service health dashboards and a way to fetch the required data to power them on-the-fly. No need to worry about data ingestion or re-instrumentation. But feedback we’ve gotten from customers has told us that, while our built-in dashboards are a great starting point (and for many, perfectly sufficient), there are individuals and even whole teams that want more customization.
And so, in Q3 2025 we released the ability to customize dashboards for each integration. And with Zurich, we’ve expanded on that functionality with the ability to copy the definition of a chart in another tool (called a query), and paste it into Service Observability’s chart configuration.
Let me show you how it works!
How It Works:
Service Observability comes with two sets of customizable dashboard tabs out-of-the-box: Overview and Observability. Each set of dashboards can be customized, either by adding (or removing) charts, or editing charts that we ship by default (called “Certified” dashboards). As of the Zurich release you can create line charts from any metric data in MetricBase, or that is stored in a supported third party provider.
ServiceNow and third parties alike store metrics in a database, and they use queries to retrieve them so they can be visualized in a chart. Essentially, all you have to do is find a chart you want to copy over in a third party tool, copy the underlying query, and paste it in the Service Observability chart creator.
Now, most providers have custom databases and custom query languages, but the great news is that you don’t have to worry about that with Service Observability. When we roll out new integrations, we do the work on our end to support each provider’s query language, so you can simply copy/paste!
Step-by-Step
First, we’ll create a new, empty chart in one of your Service Observability dashboards:
- In Service Observability, navigate to the “Observability” tab, and click “Edit” to enable edit mode
- Click ”Add new element” and select “Data visualization”. This will add a new chart, likely to the bottom of your dashboard. Feel free to move this around or resize it before continuing.
- Select the new dashboard, and in the configuration pane on the right, change the ”Visualization type” to “Line”. Click “Add data source” under “Data sources” (note: you may have to expand the “Data” section first in order to see the “Data sources” section). This will open the ”Add data source” screen.
For this blog post, we’re going to walk through using New Relic, though you can follow similar steps using other integrations!
Copy/paste from New Relic
- Select ”New Relic Metrics” under "Service Observability" from the data source list on the left. Enable the “Advance” toggle in the upper right corner.
- Find the chart in New Relic that you’d like to replicate in Service Observability. There should be a hamburger menu near the top-right corner (i.e. three dots on top of each other). Click that menu and select “View query” to open the query menu at the bottom of the screen.
- Copy the full query from the “Query your data” menu. Paste it into the "Query" box in the "Add data source" screen
Note: the query as-copied from New Relic is specific to whichever “entity” you were viewing and is denoted in the query using an entity filter. In the example below it is:WHERE (entity.guid = 'NjQzNjMOM3xBUE18QVBQTEIDQVRJT058MTA00Tk2ODc5Nw’)
This means that this chart query will only return data for this specific entity. If you want to use this chart in a template that will be used for multiple services (or other CIs), you can replace this specific guid with a template variable.
This will essentially replace the guid in the query with the value aligned to whichever service you are looking at in Service Observability. We show this in the example below! It is a great way to make your dashboard templates widely usable, but can be a bit confusing at first. Feel free to reach out to your account team for help!
- Select a service from the ”Service” drop down list to enable a preview, and ensure your data source is selected under ”New Relic entity”. Click “Run” or “Refresh” to ensure the chart loads as expected
- Click "Add this source" and finally "Save" your updated dashboard!
What's Next
And that’s it! You should now be able to copy/paste charts over from New Relic (or other supported providers) into Service Observability. We hope this goes a long way towards enabling your teams to make ITOM the best first place to go when you’re investigating an incident or service alert.
Feel free to let us know in the comments if you’d like to see more blog posts featuring other integrations. You can of course reach out to your account team if you’d like some help getting hands-on, or if you have any questions about Service Observability.
