Platform Analytics Dashboard Refresh — Is the Decoupled Widget Refresh By Design?

[MonfardiniS]

Hi everyone,

We’re currently rolling out Platform Analytics dashboards and have run into one core challenge that’s making it harder to sell the move away from Core UI dashboards: the refresh behavior.

In Core UI dashboards, all widgets refreshed together because they relied on a single, centralized reporting engine.

In Platform Analytics, we’re seeing that the dashboard refresh does not reload all widget data at once.
Instead, each widget seems to refresh independently. From what I understand, this is because Platform Analytics is built on a fully modular architecture, where:

• each widget is its own component
• each widget runs its own backend query
• the dashboard‑level refresh simply sends a “please update” signal
• and each widget decides when (or if) it refreshes

This matches the community posts that says a Platform Analytics dashboard is a collection of independent visualization components, and each widget runs its own backend call. [servicenow.com]

I assume this was designed this way to support the much broader set of visualization types Platform Analytics now handles — indicators (PA), table data, MetricBase, UX Analytics, etc. Since the data sources are so varied, widgets can’t be forced to refresh simultaneously.

My question to the community:
Is my understanding correct? Is this independent widget refresh behavior intentional and expected in Platform Analytics?

I’d really appreciate confirmation from others, because this is becoming a key discussion point when explaining why Platform Analytics dashboards don’t behave like Core UI dashboards.

Thanks in advance!

[Dr Atul G- LNG]

Hi @MonfardiniS 

Is my understanding correct? Is this independent widget refresh behavior intentional and expected in Platform Analytics?

Yes, your understanding is 100% correct regarding the performance issue the system has introduced.