Report and Dashboard governance

[SusanWinKY]

All of our ITIL users are able to create reports and dashboards.  Over time, as expected, we've accumulated quite a lot of reports.  We've been asked to put a governance process in place to deactivate reports and dashboards that are no longer needed. 

Has anyone implemented such a governance policy and would be willing to share your decision-making and implementation regarding this?

My initial thought is to set up a scheduled email that asks the owner of each report/dashboard if it's still needed, and provide two links (Yes | No).  Upon clicking No, the report or dashboard would be deactivated. 

Another thought is to automatically deactivate a report/dashboard whenever the owner/creator of it is deactivated, but then we run the risk of deactivating something that others may be using.  With the email method, we at least put the decision in the hands of the person who owns it.  We'd still have to figure out how to handle reports/dashboards that are owned by a deactivated user, but I think our team can manage that.

[Rafael Lima de]

Hi @Scott Jordheim, thanks for your tips.

You make some Service Catalog to users request new reports? Could you give me some examples  of how your users make this requests?

I'm new in ServiceNow and I have no ideia how to this.

[Scott Jordheim]

Yea, we have some service catalog items for users to request report builds. It goes through the workflow of creating a task to my team and asks for things like report name, desired due date, etc. Users have used the form to request reports that track amount of tasks to their team by task type per month and other topics.

[Rafael Lima de]

Very nice @Scott Jordheim, thanks for help. 

Sincerely.

Rafael Lima

[saileedali]

HI Scott,

Could you please direct me where I can find when the dashboard was last run or viewed by the user?

We basically want to delete unused reports and start governance over the dashboard usage. The dashboard those are not being used will be deleted based on that data the dashboard was last run or viewed.

Thanks in advance!

REgards,

Sailee

[Scott Jordheim]

This is the official way to do it from SNow, but I didn't want to be charged for extra tables, so I cannibalized it a bit: https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_blog&sys_id=19bdcd95dbb5ef001089e15b8a961937

This query will take you to the navigator histories table with a filter of 6 months set to look for dashboards. From there, you will need to slim it down a bit in Excel after you export the list to look for unique values only in the name column. Finally, take that back to ServiceNow's dashboards table (pa_dashboards I believe) and inject "is not one of" into your operator list. Convoluted, but it works and doesn't cost us anything.

Query for navigator histories (last 6 months): https://[YOUR INSTANCE NAME HERE]/sys_ui_navigator_history_list.do?sysparm_clear_stack=true&sysparm_query=titleSTARTSWITHdashboard%5Esys_created_onONLast%206%20months%40javascript:gs.beginningOfLast6Months()%40javascript:gs.endOfLast6Months()&sysparm_first_row=1&sysparm_view=

Query with "not in" added: https://[YOUR INSTANCE NAME HERE]/pa_dashboards_list.do?sysparm_query=nameNOT%20INa&sysparm_view=