Consequences of and/or reasons for changing KB Property glide.knowman.view_age.days from 30 default to 0

[Michael QCKM]

Re: Number of days (integer, default 30) used when summing article views (glide.knowman.view_age.days)

I know I've asked this before, but it keeps coming up and it is NOT clear to me or anyone in my group.

We need to understand the consequences of this field when creating Reports and looking at List Views.

• If I run a Report to see the number of KB articles, never Viewed, Last updated over 1 year ago, I get a big list, but I'm told that it is wrong because it is ONLY really showing the last 30 days.

• We try to show historical upkeep, like Drafts in queue for over 6 months, or articles in Review for over 6 months, etc.  But everytime I give a report - that looks good - nobody trusts it because they think it's actually only calculating 30 days despite what it seems.

• If we set this to 0 to show ALL days, is there a negative impact of this?
• Is anyone doing it this way?
• If I leave it at 30 days, can I provide accurate historical/trend reports for periods LONGER than 30 days?

Number of days (integer, default 30) used when summing article views (glide.knowman.view_age.days)

Enter a number of days to consider when calculating view count. The View count field in the Knowledge form will be updated periodically to reflect the view count based on this property. For example, if you enter 60, the view count is the total number of views in the past 60 days. Enter 0 to have ServiceNow consider all views, regardless of date. Note: If you edit this property, run the Count Knowledge Use scheduled job to see the changes immediately. By default, the Count Knowledge Use scheduled job runs daily and updates the view counts on the knowledge articles. To view the scheduled job, navigate to System Scheduler > Scheduled Jobs > Scheduled Jobs. New customers as of the Paris release will not have access to the View count property and Count Knowledge scheduled job. Existing customers prior to the Paris release can continue to use the property and scheduled job. If you set the property value to 0: The Count Knowledge scheduled job does not run. The View count of an article contains the accumulated value of total count.

[Lucas Vieites · Accepted solution]

Ah, yes, you can see the ones that weren't viewed in the last 30 days looking at the records with "sys_view_count = 0", but those might have been viewed before that.

It's hard to report on things that didn't happen, in your case, the easiest way to find articles that have never been used is to make list of KB numbers from your kb_knowledge table, another list of unique numbers in kb_use, and diff both lists. Very manual, but I don't see any other quick solution.

I hope this helps.

Kind regards,
Lucas Vieites
P.S. If my reply helped you, please mark it as helpful or correct so other community members can benefit from this information.

[Michael QCKM]

Lucas,

RE: "It's hard to report on things that didn't happen"; This shouldn't be so hard... Articles are Published, and NO View Count accrued during said timeframe. (Like, was View Count upped during date range)... seems doable, but it's not there.

And I must say, as a Knowledge Admin/Manager/Worker, this count is of equal importance to me as is counting positive Views.

• It lets me know that workers may be creating articles that are NOT being used/searched for... likely meaning they are NOT following KCS...
  OR
• It can show me where articles exist but aren't being FOUND (leading me to add Meta, or other things to improve relevancy). Articles that are viewed don't necessarily need help or fixing, but if an article went through to Publishing and is then not Viewed, leads me to want to find the reason.

[Chris Armstron1]

Hi Michael, did you manage to figure out a solution to this? This exact scenario/problem has cropped up in our recent introduction of ServiceNow in October 2021!

[Michael QCKM]

Chris,
No solution as of yet. <sadface>

[Tommy SN Sahlin · Accepted solution]

Hi @Michael QCKM , @Lucas Vieites and @Chris Armstron1 

I just stumbled over this post which has been quiet for over a year, but if I understand correctly what you are trying to achieve report-wise, I think you can do it quite easily in Report Designer.

1. Create a new report based on the kb_knowledge table, set other conditions as needed
2. Click Related List Conditions at the bottom of the Conditions section
3. Click on the phrase "Greater than or Equal to 1", change it to "None"
4. Click the -Table- dropdown, select "Knowledge Use->Article", set other conditions as need

Once done it should look like this:

You have now told the report to return a list of all articles in the kb_knowledge table that do NOT exist in the kb_use table = have not been viewed.

cheers, hope that helps /Tommy