Performance Analytics (series) Widgets

[Michael Fry1]

Continuing in our Performance Analytics series, we’re ending with Widget and Dashboards.

Widgets enable you to define visualizations for indicator scores. Widgets are shown on dashboards. A Performance Analytics widget ties an indicator to a visualization, such as a trend line, a set of columns, or a pie chart. Within the widget, you can filter or group indicator scores by breakdowns. You can also apply time series functions, such as 7-day sums, to the scores.

Below is the new Widget form. Default type is Time

The first step in creating a widget is to select the type of widget to create.

Widget type	Purpose	Typical Visualizations
Time Series widget	Shows changes over time in indicator scores.	Line visualization is the most usual. Other visualizations are: spline, step, column, stacked column, area, and relative compare.
Breakdown widget	Groups indicator scores by the elements of a breakdown.	Scorecard, pie and similar charts, funnel and pyramid, column and similar charts, relative compare, line, Pareto, pivot scorecard, and treemap.
Score widget	Shows aggregate indicator scores. Can show an indicator score against a target.	Latest score, speedometer, real-time score.
List widget	Lists the metrics for several indicators.	Scorecard, spider web.
Pivot widget	Groups the scores of one indicator by the elements of two breakdowns.	Heatmap
Text analytics	Visualizes word frequencies and groupings in the text that users enter in forms	Word cloud
Workbench widget	Shows multiple indicators and their relations, to monitor a workflow or other process.	Workbench

After creating your widget, open the Dashboard you want to add your new widget too. At the top right of the dashboard, click the icon with the + in a circle:

Then under Widget Category choice Performance Analytics. Then either search for your widget name using the filter or navigate using the Time series.

I hope this series has helped clarify the sequence of steps required to build a complete Performance Analytics solution starting from the Indicator Source and continuing all the way through to the final Dashboard visualization.

Thanks for reading!

[Matthew_13]

@Michael Fry1  - This wraps up the Performance Analytics series nicely. The clear breakdown of widget types and how they tie indicators to dashboards makes it much easier to understand how data turns into insight, not just how to build charts. A great, practical guide for anyone designing meaningful dashboards in ServiceNow. Great share my friend!

[jeffrubinoff]

It's worth noting that starting in Australia, non-admin users will not be able to create widgets or responsive dashboards. Instead, you will use the same Platform Analytics data visualizations, filters, and dashboards that you would use for table data. You gain some advantages, such as only having to learn one front end for all data, but not all features of the Reporting and PA front ends are preserved. This is probably a good time to learn how to use Platform Analytics!