Reports and metrics - where is the difference and in what use-cases

stefanolejko · ‎02-09-2018

Hey everyone,

I just discussed with a colleague what the differences are between reports and metrics. Now iam totally confused.

Can someone describe me the differences and maybe with a use case so it gets totally clear and I can explain it to him?

Naresh27 · ‎02-09-2018

Metric is something you measure in general. the same applies in ServiceNow Metrics using Metrics definitions/Metric instance table's. Metric is tracking of a change happened on any field on any table like when/by whom/how long/old&new values. what gets tracked is instance, what you define to track is definition.
1. for example Incident assignment group, incident can be assigned to may group in its life. so if you want to track all the changes on group like when/whom/how long it was assigned to specif/all groups.
On the other hand, Reports are more kind of way to show information in several ways by using data from service now tables and applying filters like incidents opened this week. As you understand. you can also create a Report an a metric.

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Slawek_Radziewi · ‎02-09-2018

Report shows you current data in time for tables.

Collectors can run daily, weekly, monthly and they collect data from tables you define in this moment of time and store it into scoresheets.

Once you have more data collected you can use it on dashboard and create widgets and use Performance Analytics features like trends, forecasts, tresholds and of course see historical values.

Josh Cooper · ‎02-13-2018

This will be a drastic over-simplification, but should help to keep them all straight:

A basic Report will show you the current values for records, no scripting allowed for the most part, just concrete values as they currently exist.

PA collects important KPIs in nightly (for the most part) jobs. In my head I think of it as automatically running a report and putting the data into Excel for trending reports. In the past you'd run a report daily and then copy it into Excel. PA does that bit for you.

Easiest way to underline the difference between reports and PA is, say I want to compare the number of tickets that I have Open because they're Awaiting Info. With a Report I can see that for right now, but if I try to report on how many tickets were opened last month and had a state of Awaiting Info, you can see which tickets were Open last month because of the day, but you can't see what state they WERE in, only what they ARE in. I.e. I had 20,000 incidents open last month, 19,900 of those are in the "Closed" state. Because PA collects the data from those counters nightly into the score table, a PA report trend can show you what the value was.

Metrics: There is arguably some overlap with PA here - because rather than doing a count of Open Incidents with a Breakdown for Status, you could potentially get some of that information from the Metric table, if you have a metric that measures the field value duration of the State field. You'd be able to determine based on that maybe what tickets had that status and that opened date, in a database view that merges Metric Instance with Incident, so that you can see Incident fields and Metric Instance measurements on the same form. However, every metric instance will have it's own row, and accompanying baggage, so you'd need to make sure you set up your report against the incident_metric database view, and count distinct incidents, if the arrangement of report choices allows you to do a distinct count. Also, compared to PA, Metrics make it VERY easy to do field value durations, and in PA it's not strictly possible. The other 'limitation' of Metrics is that it's for-every. I.e. you're going to measure State duration of every incident you generate, rather than specifically those that you may care about.

So you're not wrong, there's a lot of things that Metrics do that you could do in PA, and vice versa - primarily because it allows you to script complex conditions, which reports do not. The biggest differentiator at that point is the presentation layer. PA is built and designed and table structured so that it can be make those sorts of comparisons pretty straightforward. With metrics you can kinda get to the same place, but you're going to be stuck using basic reporting things to display it.

To muddy the waters further, there is a lot of power in pointing Performance Analytics at the Metrics table, so that you can see things like the average amount of time a ticket is assigned to a given assignment group, which you really can't do seperately.

Footnote: I wouldn't be surprised if metrics became folded into Performance Analytics at some point in the future, because of the amount of overlap. If so, ServiceNow is really good about grandfathering existing functionality in, but I could see it happening.

mrbenwhite · ‎04-10-2019

Hi Josh, thank you for the explanation - real helpful!