Continuing in our Performance Analytics series, we’re now talking about Indicators.
An Indicator is a defined metric or key performance measure that captures and tracks a specific value from your data at scheduled intervals (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.).
Each Indicator answers (for example):
- How many incidents were created today?
- What’s the average resolution time this week?
- How many requests breached SLA this month?
Scores are captured through collectors at scheduled intervals. Results can be filtered by breakdowns (e.g., by priority, by assignment group).
There are different types of Indicators:
- Automated Indicators: Use Case: Count of open incidents, average resolution time, number of changes approved.
- Manual Indicators: Use Case: Tracking things not stored in ServiceNow, like survey scores from an external tool or headcount figures.
- Formula Indicators: Use Case: Change Success Rate = (Successful Changes ÷ Total Changes) × 100.
- Breakdown Indicators: Use Case: Number of incidents by priority, average resolution time by assignment group.
Below is an Automated indicator. You can see it’s an Aggregate Count, unit is #, source is Incidents.Open:
Under Additional conditions you can further filter your data, if needed:
Under Access Control is where you control visibility, for example Everyone or a specific role.
The Collect Breakdown Matrix is what connects Indicator data points to the Breakdown elements:
There are more settings that can be turned on/off or configured but I’m trying to identify the most common ones you need to set.
In the next step we will talk about Widgets and Dashboards.
