What does PA has over reporting

[joaosantos]

I've been working a little with PA and reporting and o have to ask, in what is PA superior over reporting because to me it seems like reporting is far more customizable and can answer more necessities than PA

[Robbie]

Hi,

This question could lead to quite a long and granular conversation, but I'll try and be short and sweet.

I'm happy to go over docs and point you to links available if you want more of an understanding. This question has been asked a number of times so you're not alone ; )

In a nutshell, if you want to see a count for a data set (table) such as Incidents or Changes over a specific time period (today, yesterday, this month, last month, this year, last year) reporting provides this capability easily.

If you want to see the trending of data over days/months/years next to each other, Performance Analytics is the way to go.

PA captures snapshots of data on a regular basis for each KPI.   Then, over time, you can visualize how those KPIs are trending. You can also add targets and layer multiple KPIs onto the same gauge.

Here's quite a helpful link among others. Its best to play and switch on the out of the box features to find out more.

Performance Analytics concepts: How do they all work together?

[Chuck Tomasi]

To add to what Robbie said, reporting tells you statistics about the past on things like # of incidents currently open, or closed. When used with a time series, it is still telling you about the current data (e.g. if an incident is reopened, your stats are skewed.)

Performance Analytics, is all about performance management. You create "indicators" (either leading or lagging) to spot trends. If changes go up, do incidents go up as well? Basic reporting is not capable of this. Years ago, when I was a customer, I had to capture all this on a weekly basis externally in Excel. It was very painful. PA makes it much easier to configure (and reconfigure if necessary.) What's more, it can be applied accordingly to any process in your system.

I encourage you to turn on the data collector and play around with the free version to understand it better.

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/istanbul-performance-analytics-and-reporting

[mike_bush]

To add my two pence worth - Reporting is a "snapshot" of the database at the moment you run the report, seconds later it can have changed (eg Open tickets). Some unchanging fields (like CREATED) can be reliably used for "trend" type reports which can be run repeatedly for (say) "last week" or "last month" but in many cases a report gives different results each time it is run.

PA builds a mini "data-warehouse" by remembering the way things WERE on a specific date and allows more reliable trending and forecasting.

The other big benefit I see for PA is that you can define a FORMULA INDICATOR and do some quite clever, scripted stuff - this is definitely missing from the reporting app (and why people will still hook up external tools like Crystal Reports via the ODBC route)

[Zanna]

Hi there!

Actually I had the same problem as you. Looking through all the ServiceNow documentation on Performance Analytics and watching tons and tons of videos on PA actually didn’t help to understand the actual difference between it and reporting.

However, the kind people on the Community did manage to explain it to me)

The key difference is that PA provides a much better venue for data analysis because it collects and stores data over time. Some time passes – and PA ‘registers’ the state of things in your data at that moment. And after some time, you can analyze such data and see difference developments in it: what changed to the better or to the worse. While reporting only shows the data as it is now, not yesterday, not a year ago. So it is difficult, if possible, to know with reporting how exactly things were a few months ago (because the data is taken tables that change).

But this is only the key difference between PA and reporting. If you’d like to read more on it, here’s a nice and very comprehensive piece that compares PA to reporting from different perspectives.

I hope it will help!

Anna