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

[TGentry]

Tracy, can you please update us on your sql to tableau (SNOW Mirror) project and how it's coming along?

Thanks!

[Tracy Davis]

We aren't actually using Snow Mirror. We went with the tools we already had. We're using Tibco and then created views on a SQL server that only presents fields needed to support reporting needs to the end users. It's a daily data pull, so not real time but meets the needs of the users who need to combine SN data with other data sources utilizing Tableau.

We are encouraging anyone strictly reporting on SN data to try to do it within ServiceNow. So far everyone is happy 🙂 

[Giles Lewis]

I would be cautious about discarding SnowMirror as an option for the two reasons you mention.

Do you really need live data? Tableau is an analytics tool. Most organizations do not have a requirement for real-time analytics.

I have seen situations where the pull from ServiceNow was quite frequent, and it had no adverse performance impact on ServiceNow. Obviously you can't do that with everything; but for a small subset (e.g. updated incident and change request tickets) you could do a pull every 30 minutes.

As to the dot-walking, it is true that you will need to sync additional tables. But that is the advantage of product like SnowMirror: it provides a framework to help you manage all those syncs. Replicate 5 tables or 50. It is pretty much the same amount of effort once you have SnowMirror in place.

Also remember that you can create views in your SQL database to shield your end-user from complexity of the ServiceNow data model.

[Khrystyna Shpar]

Hi @Pavan51 !

Did you try Tableau Connector for ServiceNow by AlphaServe? With this Tableau Connector for ServiceNow, businesses can enjoy a streamlined and efficient data analysis experience that saves time and increases productivity.