My definition of Performance Analytics

[Paul Kunze]

Hello community,

in my company we are evaluating the value of the Performance Analytics plugin for making a decision if it would be helpful for our business case. We are trying to create a dashboard for showing a wide range of chart types in order to fully understand our data. We bumped into the limitations of the default ServiceNow charts (under Reports > Create New) quite quickly and thought that the use of PA would give us more freedom (for example for combining bar and line charts or adding a forecast).

So I digged into the documentation and available resources and also installed it in my PDA (Personal Developer Instance) for playing around with the plugin. I came to a conclusion and tried to define my own definition of PA. I would like to know what you think about it, if you agree or if you can correct me in some points in case that I missed something. I’m looking forward to your comments.

What is Performance Analytics?

The Performance Analytics plugin of ServiceNow enables you to measure the performance of your organization by collecting performance data of your business processes in regularly running scheduled jobs and visualizing this data in optimized and interactive charts. These additional charts that are available in the plugin give you more flexibility in defining what you really want to report on (the so-called indicators) and enable you to keep track of important measures as well as forecasting future values in order to support you in optimizing your IT business processes. To achieve this goal the system creates regular snapshots of the data of interest (for example open incidents) in the defined interval and reports and forecasts based on the collected information. The Performance Analytics plugin aims to ‘tell the real story’ in contrast to the default dashboard charts which always just show the as-is data of the moment you are looking into the system.

What is Performance Analytics not?

Performance Analytics does give you more flexibility in creating certain reports and focusing on critical indicators. It does provide additional value in monitoring your business processes.

But you are wrong if you think that the use of the PA plugin will enhance the default reports you are already using. The plugin provides additional functionality by adding new ways of creating reports and new report types that are only available for this specific purpose. The way and the possibilities of creating reports (under Reports > Create New) will stay exactly the same after installing the plugin. You won’t have more chart types available, no more options to configure the axis properties, no ways of adding more data to the same chart, no more options to combine several chart types, no option to modify the hover text and no possibility of adding a forecast or a cumulation to these default charts. Furthermore, PA is based on a different kind of data that is based on pre-defined indicators and has to be collected in scheduled jobs which means that PA charts cannot be used for the purpose of the default as-is reporting you are used to.

To sum it up, Performance Analytics is an added function of your ServiceNow instance but completely separate from every other modules and in itself just as limited in its functionality to what the ServiceNow developers think you will need.

I found this video most helpful for understanding the purpose of Performance Analytics: https://youtu.be/D6XHoJITzsQ