Service Catalog - Creating Reports based on Requested Items

[jshatney]

We've been working through a Service Now implementation for roughly 4 months. All of the core/foundation configuration is complete. We have built over 75 Service Catalog items. Everything seems to be moving in the right direction.

Now that I have been able to correct all of our bugs and defects, I decided to spend some time building reports.

Incident Related Reports - Check
Service Catalog Related Reports - ?!@ What huh?!@ I can't report on Variables within a requested item?

Being a sensible person, I didn't expect there to be any trouble creating reports. Instead, I find out that reporting on the variables within a Requested Items is nearly impossible WITHIN the Service Now platform.

Can someone please explain to me if there is a way to get this done? This isn't a difficult request. This is a common process that pretty much every company using Service Now needs to be able implement. The Service Catalog itself is somewhat defunct without being able to report, run metrics, and get good data OUT of the tool.

So far, the implementation partners that we are using have not given us any helpful information. They have recommended the following:

"You need to create tables with the variables as the fields…..
Then write business rules to populate the fields…You'll have to create a table per form (only way unfortunately). Then populate the value in the variables to the fields on the table. Also, on that table you need to have a reference to the request and the requested items…
(This could be a lot of hours of work depending on how many forms you have)
Also it could be hundreds of scripts."

This is unacceptable that a Enterprise Solution that costs as much as Service Now to not have the ability to easily create (I want my end users to be able to do this if they want) reports based on Requested Item variables.

Any assistance would be appreciated.

[HugoFirst]

I can get more than one variable to display, but it's still just one variable per line, not multiple variables in several columns on one line like I'd like.

The secret is to add a couple of "or" clauses to the filter which you use to get your report in the first place.
Let's say that you want to report on 3 variables: height, weight and color.

Assuming that the one variable you have listing in your report is height, the last condition of your report would probably look like:

Dependent item.question is height

Just add another clause with an "OR"
Dependent item.question is weight

Now run the report again. You'll get both variable, but it will look like this:

Question Value
height 5
weight 25

Note, this is a report showing just one record. You'd just get more rows like this if you had multiple records to display.

Now you can add a third "OR" clause:
Dependent Item.question is color

Run the report amd get something like this:

Question Value
height 5
weight 25
color red

[MathewKuriakose]

Reporting on catalog variables cannot be done effectively with service now reporting functionality.....

One way around is to create reporting fields in sc_req_item table, a business rule should be written to populate those fields from the catalog form during report submission...

complex metric reports on variables is almost impossible in SNC, we met our requirements mostly outside of the tool by using SSRS


Regards

Mathew Kuriakose

[MathewKuriakose]

Reporting on catalog variables cannot be done effectively with service now reporting functionality.....

One way around is to create reporting fields in sc_req_item table, a business rule should be written to populate those fields from the catalog form during report submission...

complex metric reports on variables is almost impossible in SNC, we met our requirements mostly outside of the tool by using SSRS


Regards

Mathew Kuriakose

[MathewKuriakose]

Reporting on catalog variables cannot be done effectively with service now reporting functionality.....

One way around is to create reporting fields in sc_req_item table, a business rule should be written to populate those fields from the catalog form during report submission...

complex metric reports on variables is almost impossible in SNC, we met our requirements mostly outside of the tool by using SSRS


Regards

Mathew Kuriakose

[MathewKuriakose]

Reporting on catalog variables cannot be done effectively with service now reporting functionality.....

One way around is to create reporting fields in sc_req_item table, a business rule should be written to populate those fields from the catalog form during report submission...

complex metric reports on variables is almost impossible in SNC, we met our requirements mostly outside of the tool by using SSRS


Regards

Mathew Kuriakose