Tableau Reporting connecting to ServiceNow

[Pavan51]

Hi there,

We are looking to explore options for Reporting. In the past our team was using Tableau reports connecting to old applications. Now once we moved to ServiceNow we are looking for options and the native reports are not that great compared to Tableau functionality we did.

Could you please let us know your experiences with tableau connecting to ServiceNow and its performance. We may also explore Snow Mirror or similar solutions

Cons:-

1. It cannot do Live connection, it can only do extraction which is one major concern

2. If we have to do dot walking we need to join and extract those tables as well

Pros:-

1. Rich interface, better slice and dice

2. Extraction to avoid load on ServiceNow platform

Any other experiences from your implementations?

Thanks in advance

Pavan

[Michael Fry1]

Our Tableau connection can only see ITSM tables. Never heard back from the team if an upgrade was needed or something else as they are trying to pull Finance data too.

[Pavan51]

That is correct. This is another shortcoming that we have seen. if there are any custom tables it may not be feasible to use tableau. We havent heard anything from ServiceNow either

[Michael Fry1]

We just gave our Tableau team access to the Table API and via Postman, they can query any table to get the data they need. https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/london-application-development/page/integrate/inbound-rest/concep...

[Tracy Davis]

We are replicating SN data (daily) to a SQL server. Tableau reporting will be off the sql server (similar to Snow Mirror) - we are just starting to do this.

We are only replicating tables and fields we've identified as necessary for reporting and also provided a data definition for each field. The tables we replicated were based on user need, so basically Incidents, Tasks, etc.

Our users were already using Tableau and needed charts that matched their other reporting for inclusion on executive dashboards. This wasn't achievable with the reporting or PA components within SN.

We are still doing some operational reporting within SN and we do have PA but Tableau really makes the data much more presentable for presentations. It also allows more flexibility on slicing and dicing the data.

We did not want to allow direct connection from Tableau to SN for multiple reasons. The users don't necessarily need access to ALL SN data and potential to impact SN performance. We found it a better choice to replicate just what was needed.