If you are responsible for managing Now Assist in your ServiceNow environment, you have likely asked yourself these questions: Which teams are using Now Assist the most? How many assists/tokens are we consuming? Are we getting real value from our investment? Understanding usage patterns is not just about monitoring consumption. It is about proving ROI, optimizing deployment, and making data-driven decisions to refine your AI strategy.
The challenge is that many platform owners are unsure where to look for this information. In this guide, we will walk through everything you need to know about tracking Now Assist usage in ServiceNow.
What You Will Learn
By the end of this post, you will be able to:
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Understand the difference between "actions" and "assists" (and why it matters for billing)
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Navigate to Now Assist Analytics and understand the out-of-box dashboards available to you
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Interpret usage data across different areas including departments, skills, and channels
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Understand how subscription management provides visibility across all instances
Assists vs Actions 101
Now Assist skills are generative AI skills designed to meet the needs of users in different workflows. Each Now Assist Skill is comprised of one or more “actions” based on the complexity of the skill. An "assist" is ServiceNow’s version of a token that measures usage of a Now Assist skill.
Different skills consume different amounts of assists. A straight-forward skill (ex. case summarization) is comprised of few actions so it consumes one assist and a complex agentic workflow is comprised of multiple actions and can consume 25 assists or more. See the entitlements package for full details on the assists. Overall, each customer has a number of available assists defined by their contract, and their sales account teams may be consulted for how to best optimize these assists.
Finding Now Assist Analytics
Now Assist Analytics is your centralized location for monitoring AI usage in your instance. This is a store application that requires no additional licensing beyond your Now Assist subscription. It provides dashboards that help you understand feature adoption, skill performance, and user behavior.
To access Now Assist Analytics, navigate to All > Now Assist Admin > Analytics. This takes you to a collection of purpose-built dashboards, each designed to answer specific questions about your Now Assist journey.
Note: these dashboards have been updated frequently since their initial release. If you are on Xanadu or newer releases, make sure you have installed the latest version from the ServiceNow Store to access all available insights.
Understanding the Out-of-Box Dashboards
Usage and Adoption Dashboard
This dashboard gives you a clear snapshot of how people are actually using Now Assist. You can filter the dashboard by date range, channel (now assist panel, virtual agent, in product), and product family (ITSM, CSM, HRSD) to drill in on the slices of usage that matter to you.
Key metrics include:
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Total Now Assist actions: Total number of actions used
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Daily Now Assist actions: Total number of actions used in a day
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Average daily unique users engaging with Now Assist: Helps you see whether engagement is growing or flattening out
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Daily unique users engaging with Now Assist: Day-by-day view of active users
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Skill group distribution: Shows where Now Assist is delivering value across different skill categories. This chart can have the data broken down by feature, family, skill, and channel
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Daily usage comparison by workflow: Helps you understand which workflows drive the most Now Assist engagement
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Skill engagement trends: Reveals which skills users are interacting with most over time
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Adoption by department: The Adoption tab shows which departments have the highest usage and which skills they use, highlighting adoption patterns across your organization
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Feedback details and Error details: Quick signals about quality and reliability feedback. This shows how users respond to the responses they are getting, while error patterns help you spot configuration or data issues before they become bigger problems
Together, these metrics give developers and admins a practical way to track adoption and understand where Now Assist is making the biggest impact.
Self-Service Performance Dashboard
This dashboard focuses specifically on deflection metrics to prove how Now Assist is reducing manual ticket creation. If you have deployed Now Assist with Virtual Agent, this view becomes particularly valuable. It answers the critical question: Is Now Assist actually reducing your service desk's workload?
You get a clear view of how Now Assist handles user queries across channels such as the Virtual Agent, and the Service Portal. You can filter by date range (default 30 days) and product feature, which is handy when you want to compare performance for a specific capability or timeframe.
Key metrics include:
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Total number of queries: How many unique questions users asked in your self-service channels
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Total number of query responses: How often Now Assist returned content using skills such as Q&A genius results or multi-turn catalog ordering
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Query resolution status: Fast feedback on quality based on how users rated their experience (note: when an end user does not mark a resolution state, it will be counted as positive feedback)
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Resolution rate: Based on successful resolutions and no response, divided by the total number of query responses, showing how much workload is being diverted from your service desk
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User-initiated events: Shows which feature handled each query
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Successful conversations by capability: Highlights which experiences contribute most to resolved interactions
Together, these metrics provide a straightforward way for developers and admins to check whether self-service is working as expected and spot where tuning or additional content might help.
Skill Performance Dashboards
Now Assist Analytics provides three dashboards for tracking skill performance at different levels of detail. Start with the high-level Skill Performance dashboard to identify trends, then drill into Skill Details or Custom Skill Details to investigate specific capabilities.
Skill Performance Dashboard
This is your high-level view across all Now Assist skills in your instance. Use this dashboard to identify which skills are gaining traction and where you should focus your attention.
Key metrics include:
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Skill engagement trend: Visualize adoption patterns across all skills over time
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Number of actions: Total volume of skill usage
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Total daily active users: How many unique users are engaging with Now Assist each day
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Total daily active users by skills: Break down daily engagement by individual skill to spot which capabilities drive the most activity
Skill Details Dashboard
This dashboard focuses on out-of-box Now Assist skills provided by ServiceNow. At the top title, there is a picker to select a Now Assist skill that you would like to dive deeper into.
Key metrics include:
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Skill engagement trend: Track usage over time for each out-of-box skill
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Total skill actions: Total number of times the skill has been used
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Accepted skill actions: How many skill executions users accepted or acted upon
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Acceptance rate: Percentage of skill actions that users found valuable (ie accepted)
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Daily active users: Number of unique users engaging with the skill each day
Custom Skill Details Dashboard
This dashboard provides visibility into the Now Assist skills you have built or customized. It helps you prove the value of tailored AI solutions with metrics that show how your custom skills perform across different contexts.
Key metrics include:
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Skill engagement trend by workflows: See how your custom skill performs across different business processes
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Skill engagement trend by products: Break down usage by product family (ITSM, CSM, HRSD, etc.)
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Skill engagement trend by features: Understand which specific features drive engagement
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Daily unique users engaging with the skill: Track daily adoption of your custom capabilities
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Executed successfully: Monitor the technical success rate of your custom skills (ie accepted executions with no error)
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Skills feedback: Capture user sentiment about your custom solutions
Important note: If you are on a pre-July 2025 version, you may only see three dashboards. The enhanced skill detail dashboards require an update to the Now Assist Analytics application.
Now Assist Guardian Dashboard
Offensive Content Dashboard
For organizations using Now Assist Guardian to filter offensive or inappropriate content and prevent prompt injection attacks, this dashboard provides visibility into how often Guardian is triggered and the impact on system performance.
Offensive Content Key metrics include:
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Guardrail-added latency: Measures the performance impact of Guardian's security checks on response times
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Percentage flagged as offensive: Shows what proportion of total interactions were identified as offensive or inappropriate
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Total offensive content occurences: Number of times Guardian detected and blocked problematic content
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Categories of offensive content: Breaks down the types of content being flagged (hate speech, harassment, etc.)
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Offensive content occurences by skill: Shows where offensive content is appearing across different Now Assist capabilities
This dashboard helps you understand both the effectiveness of your content filters and potential areas where users might be encountering friction. If you see high latency in certain skills, you can evaluate whether Guardian configuration needs adjustment. The occurrence data also reveals whether specific skills are more vulnerable to misuse, helping you prioritize security hardening efforts.
Prompt Injection Dashboard
The Prompt Injection sub-dashboard provides focused visibility into security threats where users attempt to manipulate Now Assist behavior through malicious prompts.
Prompt Injection Key metrics include:
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Guardrail-added latency: Performance impact specifically from prompt injection detection
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Percentage flagged as prompt injection: What proportion of interactions were identified as potential prompt injection attempts
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Total prompt injection occurrences: Overall count of detected prompt injection attempts across your instance
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Prompt injection occurrences by skill: Shows which Now Assist capabilities are most frequently targeted by prompt injection attempts
This focused view helps security and platform teams identify patterns in prompt injection attacks, understand which skills require additional hardening, and monitor whether malicious activity is increasing or decreasing over time.
User Search Analyzer Dashboard
This is one of the most actionable dashboards for continuous improvement. It shows you what users are searching for, which queries return AI-generated results, and critically, which searches come up empty.
Key metrics include:
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Total search queries: Volume of searches in your selected timeframe
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Queries with genius results: How often AI-generated answers successfully respond to user queries
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Queries with KB articles as genius results: Shows when knowledge articles are surfaced through Genius
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Queries with catalog items as genius results: Tracks when catalog items are returned as AI-powered search results
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Queries without genius results: Identifies searches that came up empty, signaling gaps in your content
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Search queries per source/channel: Breaks down where searches originate (Service Portal, Virtual Agent, etc.)
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Top 5 queries: Most common searches across your instance
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Top 5 queries without results: High-volume searches that need attention
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Top 5 queries resulting in knowledge articles as genius results: Most successful knowledge-based searches
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Top 5 queries resulting in catalog items as genius results: Most successful catalog-based searches
Use this data to identify gaps in your knowledge base and prioritize content creation efforts.
Now Assist Context Menu Dashboard
The context menu is how users access Now Assist directly within their workflow whether it be right-clicking on form fields or text to invoke AI capabilities. This dashboard tracks how often users discover and engage with this interaction pattern.
Key metrics include:
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Usage in this period: Total volume of context menu invocations in your selected timeframe
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Acceptance distribution: Shows how often users accept or act upon the AI suggestions triggered through the context menu
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Capability distribution: Breaks down context menu usage across different AI capabilities
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Responses by feedback: Captures user sentiment about context menu interactions (helpful, not helpful, etc.)
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Usage trend by skill: Tracks which Now Assist skills users access most frequently through the context menu over time
These insights help you understand whether users are discovering the context menu feature and finding it valuable in their daily work. If context menu usage is low despite having capable skills available, it may indicate a need for additional training or in-app guidance to help users discover this capability. The feedback data also reveals which context-initiated actions provide the most value, helping you prioritize which skills to promote through this interaction pattern.
Value Insights Dashboard
The Value Insight Dashboard translates Now Assist's AI capabilities into measurable business impact by quantifying time savings across your organization. By measuring Now Assist usage into tangible productivity metrics, such as hours saved over time, this dashboard enables you to demonstrate clear ROI to leadership and build compelling cases for continued investment.
Estimated Writing Time Saved Dashboard
These metrics focus on time saved when Now Assist generates content that users would otherwise write manually, such as resolution notes, case summaries, or knowledge articles.
Key metrics include:
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Total generated content: Overall volume of AI-generated content across your instance
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Average unique records to generate content per day: How many distinct records receive generated content daily
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Total writing time saved: Cumulative time savings across all generated content
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Average writing time saved per day: Daily time savings from content generation
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Average writing time saved trend per record: Calculation of the average time savings Now Assist saved on records over time
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Average writing time saved trend per user: Tracks time savings patterns for individual users
Special notes: Time saved is based on the word count of AI-generated content divided by an industry-average writing speed of 40 words per minute. For example, a 180-word response saves 4.5 minutes of writing time. Calculations assume users accept the AI-generated content in its entirety.
Estimated Reading Time Saved Dashboard
These metrics focus on time saved when Now Assist summarizes lengthy content, allowing users to quickly understand records without reading full descriptions and activities.
Key metrics include:
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Total generated content: Overall volume of AI-generated summaries across your instance
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Average unique records to generate content per day: How many distinct records are summarized daily
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Total reading time saved: Cumulative time savings across all summaries
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Average reading time saved per day: Daily time savings from summarization
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Average reading time saved trend per record: Calculation of the average time savings Now Assist saved on records over time
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Average reading time saved trend per user: Tracks time savings patterns for individual users
Special notes: Time saved is based on the difference between the original content length and the summary length, divided by an industry-average reading speed of 240 words per minute. For example, if a 420-word record is summarized into 180 words, users save 1 minute of reading time (240 fewer words to read).
Subscription Management: The Cross-Instance View
While Now Assist Analytics shows you what is happening within a single instance (usually a production instance), Subscription Management provides the enterprise-wide perspective. This is where you see total License and Now Assist across all your instances, including production, sub-production environments, and development instances.
To access this, navigate to Admin > Subscription Management > Subscriptions > Now Assist usage.
At the top of this view, you will see three critical numbers:
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Total Purchased: Your contracted pool of Now Assist assists
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Total Used: Assists consumed across all instances
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Available Assists: Your remaining pool
Below this summary, you will see a breakdown by instance showing which environments are consuming the most assists. This is invaluable for understanding where usage is happening. Perhaps your development team is consuming the most assists while building custom skills, or maybe one business unit's production instance is far outpacing others.
In the Subscriptions tab > Account level entitlements > Now Assist usage, you will see:
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Skill/Agent Name: What was used
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Actions: How many times each skill has been used
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Assist ratio: The relative cost for each skill
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Total assists: Consumption calculated by multiplying the number of actions by the assist ratio. This shows which skills consume the most entitlements
This breakdown helps you understand not just who is using Now Assist the most, but what they are using it for and how that translates to costs. You might discover that a heavily-used lightweight skill consumes fewer assists than a rarely-used complex agent.
Special notes: Subscription Management usage is tracked as a cumulative total over the last 365 days. This data can because information must sync across multiple instances in potentially different time zones. If you need real-time data, recommend using Now Assist Analytics on the specific instance. If you need enterprise-wide trending, use Subscription Management with the understanding that it reflects recent but not immediate usage. For further training on Subscription Management, additional resources can be found below:
- Platform Academy: All About Subscription Management
- Subscription Management Resources List
Pro Tips for Success
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Double check your clone configuration settings: The usage log table should be excluded from cloning by default, but verify this in your clone settings. If usage data gets cloned from production to development, your analytics will show misleading information.
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Establish baseline metrics early: Capture your usage patterns in the first 30 days of deployment so you can measure growth and adoption over time.
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Set up regular review cycles: Schedule monthly reviews of your usage dashboards with stakeholders to identify trends, celebrate wins, and address underutilized capabilities.
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Watch for unexpected consumption spikes: If Subscription Management shows a sudden increase in one instance, drill into Now Assist Analytics on that specific instance to understand what changed. It could indicate successful adoption or could reveal that someone accidentally left a development process running.
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Correlate usage with outcomes: Track Now Assist adoption alongside your existing service management KPIs. Are departments with higher Now Assist usage also seeing improved ticket resolution times or higher customer satisfaction scores?
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Create role-specific dashboards: Executives care about ROI and deflection rates. Service desk managers care about which fulfillers are adopting AI tools. Platform owners care about technical performance. Build targeted views for each audience rather than trying to make one dashboard serve everyone.
What's Next?
Once you have mastered usage tracking, consider these next steps:
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Explore User Experience Analytics: This platform feature allows you to instrument custom events and track user journeys through your portals and workspaces, giving you even deeper insights into how Now Assist fits into your users' workflows.
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Implement automated alerting: Use Performance Analytics indicators to trigger notifications when usage drops unexpectedly or when specific skills show declining adoption.
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Build custom skills and track their performance: Now that you understand how to measure usage, you can confidently create organization-specific Now Assist skills and prove their value through data.
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Attend the Platform Academy: ServiceNow hosts regular academy sessions focused on AI capabilities, including deep dives into configuration, optimization, and advanced use cases.
