You might want to play around with creating a Metric Definition against the consumables...usually when we hear about needing to report across time/trending, the answer is Performance Analytics, so if that isn't part of your ServiceNow licensing, creating/configuring a metric may be your best bet.
Something like this would store the details each time the quantity of a consumable changes:
That allows you to write reports showing the timing/pattern of consumption, because each change to the Quantity field value is audited/stored because of the metric definition. Like in this example we started with 58 units and burned through 6 of them:
If metrics give you what you need, there are a few things that you have to do to make this work in your environment:
- Create the Metric Definition (Metrics > Definitions in the Application Navigator)
- Update the Dictionary entry for the alm_asset table so that the Asset.Quantity field Attributes have audit=true (metrics only work on audited fields, see this page in Product documentation for details)
- Insert and stay to create a copy of the "metrics events" business rule; rename the new rule and change the table to Consumable [alm_consumable]. This is what picks up the changes for use by the metric. This is necessary because OOB metrics are only configured to work on the task tables. See this page in Product documentation for details.
Sean
