ServiceNow and Power Bi integration - Configuration Item is missing

[mattgr]

Hi All,

There is an official way to pull Incident data from ServiceNow and publish in PowerBi:

Explore your ServiceNow ® Data with Power BI | Microsoft Power BI Blog | Microsoft Power BI

It works fairly smooth, however, I have noticed that Power Bi is not pulling   Configuration Item information from ServiceNow, which gives me less visibility on trends.

Did anyone came across this before and managed to resolve? Or is there any other automated solution that would give me CIs info on the Power Bi side?

Filters I have in PowerBI:

I was wonder to which table(s) in ServiceNow there are related.

Many thanks for any help.

Matt

[Andrew Bettcher]

Hello,

As far as I understand it, the official content pack for ServiceNow/PowerBI will only read the incident table (see first line in second paragraph on the link you posted: "This post will explain how the Power BI content pack can help you analyze your ServiceNow incidents data").

I'm not sure if that includes the parent task table (I guess not) or tables extended from the incident table but it definitely doesn't include related tables such as CI or SLA.

Our DB guy tried all sorts to extend but couldn't and I guess ServiceNow don't want to make it easy as it might dissaude companies from buying PA (i.e. particularly as some Enterprise MS users get discounted or free PowerBI licenses.....)

[mattgr]

Hi Andrew,

I have already figured how to integrate it, I exporting data on the schedule reports from ServiceNow, then saving it to sharepoint and point PowerBi Data source to feed from SharePoint, these reports are working now that way almost 2 years, the only limitation is amount of the scheduled loads onPowerBI side ( 8 per day)

[Andrew Bettcher]

Aha. That's excellent. Thank you.

We tried all sorts for months and couldn't figure it. I'll give that go.

[mattgr]

This is precisly the way I have done it:

1. Created mailbox with E5 license  (has to have access to SharePoint / MicrosoftFlow and PowerBI)

2. On ServiceNow side you need to schedule report to be deliver to that mailbox ( or set of the reports if tou have big chunks of data which you going to merge in PowerBI - I would use CSV, as xlsx has some limitations)

3. Create data source location in SharePoint ( folder which that account will be accessing and where you will be storing data)

4. Set up Flow to save attachements from above created mailbox to data source:

5. Go to PowerBI Desktop  point out at the data source and set up report

Note: Make sure you are first pointing at  top sharepoint folder and use filters ( like  file type CSV  or contain name) to drill down to actual file

6. Publish it

7. Go to PowerBi online and set up schedule refresh

8. Save and enjoy. 

Few tings I have noticed:

- As it is really Service account / Mailbox you create is should be set up the way that password never expire. 

- Global SharePoint outages might affect performance

- Whole process from sending data to seeing it at report might take 15-20 min

- Thers is limitation of the PowerBI refresh cycles (8)

I hope this will be answer on how to do it.