How to render Percent Change Statistic in a Dashboard Widget

[Danielle25]

Hello,

I am trying to figure out how to render percent change of a particular indicator (New Incidents) for example using the API Method pa.getChangePercentage

Production documentation: https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/paris-now-intelligence/page/use/performance-analytics/PAFormulaUtil/reference/PAFU-getChangePercentage_S_O_O.html

The catch here is that I am also looking to display this as the percent change you see when the indicator time series is "by month sum +".

How can I apply the timeseries to a formula indicator using this method? Here is the formula I currently have:

pa.getChangePercentage($[[New Incidents]],score_start,score_end)

I tried adding the time series to the indicator [[New Incidents / By month SUM +]] but this didn't render any results.

[jeffrubinoff]

Danielle,

We don't allow SUM aggregates on percentage unit indicators because the results are usually mathematical nonsense. You can get around it by not specifying % as the unit. However, playing with this, I see only one score per month although it's a daily indicator, and the statistics and trend don't look meaningful at all. I doubt this is the formula you need.

May I ask what your business use case is, and then hopefully we can all come up with a formula that matches it?

[Danielle25]

Hi Jeff,

I have an internal client who has asked for this widget on a dashboard. The volume simply indicates "new" and I was simply using the new incidents indicator as a POC. I know that in the analytics hub, you can view the % change using By Month Sum + as the time series. I was hoping I'd be able to somehow render that in the PA widget.

[jeffrubinoff]

Well, if you look at my screenshot, it sure isn't giving you this, even in Analytics Hub/KPI Details!

Still don't think By month SUM+ is what you want, because having a partial month at the end is going to be potentially very misleading at first glance.

Have you tried a time series widget with a column visualization and a Previous Period Chart? On either a By month SUM of the daily or on a monthly indicator on the same table, but unfortunately a new indicator source.

[Danielle25 · Accepted solution]

Hi Jeff,

I did actually figure this out. In order to render the % change using the month sum, I had to create a new indicator source with frequency set to Monthly and conditions that say "created last month".

For some reason when the indicator source conditions had "created on this month" the % change was 1 month off.

The widget is a time series where the volume is captured in columns and a secondary widget indicator renders a % change formula indicator that I created using a monthly indicator in a formula which has the pa.getChangePercentage method.