Best Practice for Identifying Low-Use, Unused Reports / Minimizing Impact to Organization

[mattlaplant]

Hello, I have reviewed both ServiceNow documentation and several community posts and am having difficulty finding clear information on best practice to action on our report cleanup/retirement.

-Does ServiceNow provide a direct mechanism within its platform to identify and retire low/unused reports?

-If "No", what is the best metric to review and measure reports for retirement manually? ServiceNow provides some variables through 'report_stats_list' that allow users to datamine usage statistics to determine how which could be suitable for retirement.

Below is some of the ServiceNow's definitions for these properties:

'Viewed' "The number of times users opened or displayed the report. A view does not always require a new database execution because ServiceNow may display cached results or show the report as part of a dashboard. This metric reflects consumption rather than processing. "

'Executed ' "the total number of times the report has been run. Each execution typically involves querying data and rendering fresh results. "

'Last Run' "The most recent date/time the report was executed against the database to generate results. This indicates when ServiceNow actually processed the report query."

Given the above and what I have read, I have some  questions to better understand how these correspond to usage:

-Community discussions lead to me to believe that Views and Runs may not account for reports that are run through dashboards. Is this true?

-In our system, we have Reports whose "Last Viewed On" date returns dates from as long ago as 2019, but their "Last Run" as being 2026. I'm not sure what this means; is this a byproduct of the System running the reports, as in this is something that happens automatically?

-Digging into the fields available in reporting I noticed there's "Recent Number of Executions", but so far as I am aware there is no timeframe tied to this and it is a system property for reports that counts to 25? Can you help me better understand what this is used for?

-I was hoping there would be a definitive metric through which we could identify usage, but it seems to be a combination of "Last Viewed", "Last Run" and total numbers of Runs. We want to be as undisruptive as possible in our retirement of reports, but I fear our data quality for report usage may be hindering us in this regard.

Any help on this would be much appreciated!

[Tsura Andreeva]

I am not sure if this will be useful to you but take a look at all the reports that are not part of dashboards, not shared and are created by inactive users, that will take a good chunk out.